University of Virginia Library

THE
MAMMOTH CAVE.

1. CHAPTER I.

Caves—the world of rock-ribbed darkness
under our feet—have always formed a subject
on which my imagination delighted to
dwell; and to this day, the name seldom
falls upon my ears without conjuring up a
thousand grimly captivating associations—
thoughts of the wild and supernatural, the
strange and terrific—which are the more enticing
for being so unlike the usual phantasms
of a day-dream existence. To my boyish

conceits, Epimenides gathering wisdom in a
brown study of fifty years in the cavern of
Crete, was a much wiser personage than the
other seven sages of Greece, who merely
hunted for truth at the bottom of a well; while
Bassus, the Carthaginian, digging, with a
Roman army, for the lost treasure-cave of
queen Dido,[1] was a greater hero than the
mightiest Julius wading in blood at Pharsalia.
For the same reason, if the truth must be
told, I even held that the dark Hades—the
inamabile regnum, as Tisiphone so emphatically
called it—the domain of Pluto, which,
as every body knows, was only to be reached
through the dismal antres of Cumæ and
Tænarus, was a decidedly more interesting
habitation for curious spirits than even the
sun-lit and privileged tops of Olympus. The
Troglodytes were my beau ideal of a sensible
and happy nation.

Some tincture of my own peculiar propensity,
however, I think may be traced in
the mind of the world at large. It is certain,
there are few subjects on which men have
given, and still continue to give, a greater
loose to their imaginations than that of caves.
The time has indeed gone by when they believed
that devils and condemned souls had
their appointed place within the hollows of
the earth, accessible, even to mortal foot,
through each cavern, each alta spelunca that
yawned on its surface; the Pythium no longer
breathes its oraculous vapour; the cave of Trophonius
whispers no more the secrets of fate;
and even the modern hags of the broomstick,
that once

and the fairy Gnomes that
are no longer expected to be found quiring
around the infernal caldron, or dancing amid
their heaps of gleaming treasure. But if
Truth—the murderess of Fancy—has been
at work on the classic mythos and the Gothic
fable, she has still left us enough to wonder
at in the world below; she has robbed it of
the supernatural, but not of the marvellous.
The Mundus Subterraneus of old father Kircher,
however exploded in most of its particulars,
among scientific men, contains nothing
too incredible for the mass of mankind. Fortunately,
as it happens, for the good old
Jesuit's sake, as well as mankind's, there are,
as far as mere caves are concerned, so many
wonders already established as undoubted
facts, that a man may be pardoned for believing
almost any thing.—But let us glance
at some of these authenticated marvels.
They will form a proper introduction to the
subject of the present description—the limestone
Pandemonium, with which I desire to
make the reader acquainted. A propylon of
wonders becomes the Mammoth Cave, and
should lead the way up to its gaping door, as
rows of sphinxes conduct the traveller to the
front of an Egyptian temple.

The famous Eldon Hole of Derbyshire

(who has not heard of the Eldon Hole?) has
been sounded with a plummet-line of nearly
ten thousand feet in length—that is, within
but a little of two miles—without reaching the
bottom; and the Pit of Fredericshall, in Norway,
it is inferred from the number of seconds
a stone consumes in reaching the bottom,
must be more than two miles in depth.
Whether the sound of a falling stone, rever-berating
through a tube even smoother than
than we can fancy the pit of Fredericshall to
be, could be actually heard at the depth of
eleven thousand feet, I leave to be conjectured;
but I may aver, in reference to the
Eldon Hole, which was really sounded by a
line to the depth mentioned, that if the doctrine
of internal fire, resuscitated by modern
Vulcanists, be true, and the scale of increasing
temperatures adopted by them be just,
there ought to ascend from this same convenient
flue, heat enough to warm all Derbyshire.
The internal heat of the earth is
said by philosophers to increase 1° Fahrenheit,
for every 100 feet of descent. If the
mouth of Eldon Hole were on a level with
the general surface of the earth, the bottom
ought to be at a temperature 100° above the
mean temperature (say 50°) at the surface.

Two miles under ground! With these facts
in view, who shall quarrel with his neighbour
for believing, as many a man does, that he
has eaten his dinner, in the Mammoth Cave,
under the bed of Green River? or with the
monkeys of Gibraltar for having made their
way from Africa to Europe, as every body
knows they must have done, via the Grot of
St. Michael, under the foundations of the
Mediterranean?

The extent of caves is a subject upon
which men are still more inclined to be glorious.
But here we have facts enough on
record to countenance any stretch of magniloquence;
besides opinions, which, as the
world goes, have, in general, with mankind,
all the weight and consequence of facts.
Thus, the people of Java are of opinion that
the sacred cave of Samarang affords a submarine
passage from their island to Canton,
in China—a distance of somewhat more than
two thousand miles, traced in a line as straight
as could be winged by an albatross. But
leaving opinions, let us refer to a fact of philosophic
celebrity, which, besides being quite
a settler of all difficulties, possesses some peculiar
features of interest. In the year 1752,
the Rio del Norte, one of the greatest rivers

of America, (its length is reckoned at full
two thousand miles,) suddenly sank into the
earth, leaving its bed dry for a space of fifty
leagues; and in this condition it remained
several weeks, the waters flowing into some
subterranean abyss, which it required them
so long a time to fill. Allowing the river at
the Paso del Norte, where the incident occurred,
to be but a quarter-mile wide, and its
depth but five feet, with a current of two
miles the hour, and supposing it continued to
sink into the earth during two weeks, we can
give a pretty shrewd guess at the extent and
capacity of the cavern in which it was swallowed
up. According to my calculations, to
dispose of such a body of water, would have
demanded a cave one hundred feet wide and
high, and just five hundred miles long! Nor
must this statement, however lightly made,
be considered absurd. Let it be remembered
that the channel of the river for a space of
fifty leagues, was absolutely robbed of its
waters. Supposing their disappearance had
been only momentary, it is easy to perceive,
the abyss that received them must have been
vaster than we can readily figure to our imaginations.

After this, no one need doubt the veracity

of those travellers who relate their moderate
rambles of “twenty miles or thereabouts” in
the great caves of the West. No one need
even be astounded at the grandeur of that
renowned cave of Tipperary, discovered in
1833, with its chambers—“wider than angels
ken”—one “nearly a mile in circumference,”
another “of about three miles in circumference”—so
paddywhackishly described by an
enthusiastic correspondent of the Tipperary
Free Press; though, sorry we are to confess,
in the hands of a malicious surveyor, the hall
of a mile in circumference is said to have
suddenly shrunk into a room of ninety feet by
one hundred and fifty, and that of three miles
into one of one hundred feet by just two hundred
and fifty. This is a climax somewhat
similar to that of the story of the seventy
cats—“our cat and another one!” But what
if it be? There is
The wonders of the cave-world are not yet
exhausted.

Let us accompany Humboldt, the profoundest
of chorographers, the most veracious

of travellers, to the cave of the Guacharo,
among the mountains of Cumana, in South
America. It opens on the face of a precipice,
a grand abyss seventy-seven feet high
and eighty-five wide. A river, born of darkness
and night, like many of the streams of
Carniola, rolls from its mouth; while festoons
of creeping plants, the ivies of the tropics,
hanging from the rocks above, and glittering
with flowers of every gorgeous dye, swing
across the chasm like so many boa-constrictors
on the watch for prey. A grove of
palms and ceibas—the tropical cotton-wood
—rises tall and verdant at the very entrance,
with birds singing, and monkeys chattering,
among the boughs. Through this grove you
enter the cave; and in this grove you continue,
even when the world of sunshine has
been left some distance behind. The palms
still lift their majestic tops, and the ceibas
rub their green heads against the rocky roof;
whilst flowers—the heliconia, the dragon-root,
and others—bloom under your feet.
The palms and ceibas at last cease to appear;
but not so the flowers. As far as man has
penetrated—a distance of more than a quarter
of a mile—you still see them growing,
and all in darkness; on the hill of the cascade
(for a hill there is, and a cascade too,) and
beyond, you find them flourishing among
pillars of stalactite, as pale, as sequlchral, as
fantastic, yet as beautiful, as the growth of
spar around them. One might here dream
of the grove of Aladdin, with its trees bearing
fruits of diamond and ruby, of sapphire
and emerald; and the more especially as
every rub of your iron lamp against a spar
calls up before your affrighted eyes a thousand
horrible genii—not the mighty sons of
Eblis indeed, but black and dismal guacharos,
birds bigger than our northern screech-owls
—that with fluttering wing and thrilling
shriek, repel the invader of their enchanted
abode. Compared with such a subterraneous
elysium, the garden discovered by Don
Quixotte, in his memorable exploration of the
cave of Montesinos, el mas bello, ameno y
deleitoso que puede criar la naturaleza—the
most beautiful and delightful that nature ever
made—is but a kitchen garden.

But what is even the cave of the Guacharo
to the Flaming Caves of Cumanacoa—two
wonders of nature hidden among the same
mountains? In the face of a tremendous precipice
looking over the savage woods that
skirt the mountain below, are two immense

holes, visible at a great distance, even in the
day-time. But it is at night that they are
seen to the best advantage; and then, if his
star be propitious, if the Indian Cyclopes in
the bowels of the Cerro start from their slumbers
to renew their oft interrupted toil at
forge and bellows, the traveller, leaping from
his own uneasy couch, beholds with amazement
the mouths of the caverns lighted up
with flames; he sees, high on the sable cliff,
two mighty disks of fire that glare upon him
from afar, like the eyes of some crouching
monster—a tiger-cat as big as a Cordillera
—or those more portentous orbs that might
have blazed under the brows of the archenemy,
when he
the Quinbus Flestryn of demons. The Indians
and Creoles that take to their heels at
the first shriek of the guacharos, could be
scarcely expected to brave the terrors of the
Flaming Caves. The thick forests at the
base of the cliffs are, besides, the haunts of
innumerable jaguars—creatures that think
little of shouldering a bullock in the midst of
the herd, and tramping victorious off, and
would, of course, think still less of swallowing
a herdsman who should come in their
way. Hence, as it happens, mortal man has
not yet disturbed the solitude, or explored the
wonders of the Flaming Caves, which he is
content to admire at the distance that lends
safety, as well as enchantment, to the view.

Of an equally, perhaps of a still more,
wonderful character is another cave of South
America—in Peru or Bolivia, I think—of
which I once read, though I cannot now tell
where to lay my hands on it, that gapes on
a mountain side, as black and gloomy as
cave may be, until the close of the day; when,
the shades of the mountain having fallen over
it, and over every thing else in the neighbourhood,
on a sudden, warm sunshine gushes
from its jaws, lights up the objects around,
smiles, trembles, fades, and then expires.
This must be the entrance to the Elysium of
the American races—the Happy Hunting
Grounds, which all the tribes, savage and
civilized together, believe the Master of Life
has prepared for the souls of the brave and
just. But, unfortunately, no Humboldt has
yet visited the spot, and we know no more of
it than I have mentioned. Within its unknown

chambers we should perhaps find such
Hesperian Gardens and Elysian Fields as
must leave even the cave of the Guacharo in
the shade—crystal wildernesses, overgrown
with phosphorescent cryptogamiœ—those luminous
plants, which, in the coal-mines of
Dresden, and some other places, hanging in
festoons from the roof and pillars, and stretching
in tapestry along the walls, diffuse a
glorious lustre on all around; until the visiter,
amazed and delighted, fancies himself in the
palace of the Fairy Queen, or a cavern dug
out of moonlight. The South American cave,
to whatever cause it may owe its resplendent
emanation, is, undoubtedly, a great wonder;
but the rocks of the Nile and the Orinoco exhale
music—why should not others breathe
sunshine?

According to old Mezeray (or rather, according
to some of those philosophers who
quote him, for I myself could never light upon
the page that records the marvel,) there is a
cavern in Dauphiny, near Grenoble, famous
as the seat of a subterraneous Erie and Niagara,
famous also for the exploring voyage
performed in it, in his youth, by Francis I, in
royal person. At a considerable distance
from the entrance was a sheet of water of

unknown bounds, which had previously arrested
the steps of all visitants. But what
shall restrain the curiosity of a king? A
barge was constructed, illuminated with hundreds
of flambeaux, and launched into the
flood; into which the gallant Francis, attended
by a party of his bravest courtiers, struck
boldly out, the Columbus of the caverned deep
—taking good care, however, to leave a huge
beacon-fire blazing behind him on the rocky
beach, to secure his safe return. A voyage
of three miles (cave-distance, be it recollected,)
conducted the royal adventurer to the opposite
shores of the ocean; whence having
landed, and, I suppose, taken possession in
the usual style of discoverers, he turned his
prow in another direction, determined to
fathom all the mysteries of the lake. By and
by, an experienced boatman declared the
barge was no longer floating on a stagnant
lake, but in a current that was perceptibly
increasing in strength; and a courtier called
the attention of the monarch to a hollow
noise heard in the distance, which, like the
current, was every moment growing stronger
—nay, even swelling into horrific thunder.
The navigators rested on their oars, while a
plank, to which several flaming torches were
tied, was committed to the water. It floated
rapidly away, became agitated, tossed up
and down, and finally pitched down the unknown
cataract, to which the rival of Charles
V. was so ignorantly hastening. “Back
oars!” was then the cry; and all rowing for
their lives, the monarch had the good fortune
to regain his beacon, and the upper air, with
which, it appears, he remained content for
the rest of his life.

A singular story was formerly told of a
cave in Upper Canada, in the ridge that
bounds the western shore of Ontario, from
which it was but seven or eight miles removed.
It bore the awe-inspiring title of the
Devil's Wigwam—Manito Wigwam—so called
by the Indians, who seemed very devoutly
to believe that the father of lies had there established
his head-quarters. (Had they put
him in the Irish cave, previously described,
the residence would have been more appropriate.)
The Manito-Wigwam was reported
to be of vast depth, consisting of several terraces
separated one from another by precipices
of more than a hundred feet perpendicular
pitch, the last terminating in a fathomless
gulf, into which no human being had ever
endeavoured to penetrate. From this cavern,

once a week, issued a terrific din, an earthquake-like
explosion, of such force as to
shake the hills for five leagues around. The
Manito-Wigwam was therefore a very wonderful
cave. I say was, for I know not
whether it is now in existence. The same
enterprizing spirit which has converted Niagara
into a mill-pond, might as easily have
modified the Devil's Wigwam into a hole for
storing winter potatoes.

To this catalogue of wonderful caverns,
which I might easily swell to greater length,
it would be unpardonable not to add a notice
of the marvellous one discovered a year or
two since by two scientific gentlemen of
Philadelphia, in one of the mountain counties
of East Tennessee; in which they lighted
upon the petrified bodies of two men and a
dog, of races manifestly older by many thousand
years than the men and dogs of the
present day. Those venerable remains it
was said to be the intention of the discoverers
to remove from their rocky dwelling to
the more appropriate shelves of a museum, to
take their places among mummied moderns
of the time of Pharaoh, and divide with Javanese
dragons and mermaids the admiration
of a discerning public. It does not, however,

appear that these petrified ancients
have yet left their cavern, not so much as a
finger having been received in any museum
in the land; a circumstance that can only be
accounted for by the ingenious and veracious
editor, to whom the public owes the first notice
of the discovery.

2. CHAPTER II.

Among so many wonders and prodigies,
the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, it may be
supposed, must sink into insignificance. It
reveals no subterranean gardens, no Stygian
lakes, no stupendous waterfalls; it discharges
no volcanic flames, it emits no phosphoric
sunlight; it contains no petrified pre-Adamites,
and no hollow thunders are heard resounding
among its dreary halls. It is not two miles
deep; it is not five hundred miles long—nay,
it can no longer boast even the twenty miles
of extent, which formerly contributed so much
to its glory. The surveyor has been among
its vaults; he has stretched his chain along
its galleries, he has broken the heart of its
mystery, and, with cruel scale and protractor,

he has laid it down upon paper. He has illustrated
the truly remarkable fact, which none
but the most cold-blooded of philosophers
were ever before inclined to suspect—namely,
that when you would know the true extent
of any antre vast in which you have journeyed,
the admiring of all admirers, you
should first take the shortest extent you can
possibly believe it to be, and then divide
that length by the sum total of your
thumbs and fingers, being satisfied that,
if the answer be not exactly right, it will be
extremely near it. Thus Weyer's cave in
Virginia—the Antiparos of the Ancient Dominion,
one of the loveliest grots that fairy
ever, or never, danced in—was, until recently
surveyed, pretty universally considered as
being full three miles in length. By the rule
above, we should bring its true extent down
to between five and six hundred yards; a result
that very closely coincides with the admeasurement
of the surveyor. By the same
rule, we should reduce the Mammoth Cave to
two miles; which comes but little short of the
truth. Nevertheless, the Mammoth Cave is
still the monarch of caves: none that have
ever been measured can at all compare with
it, even in extent; in grandeur, in wild,
solemn, severe, unadorned majesty, it stands
entirely alone. “It has no brother, it is like
no brother.”

What I have said of the length of this
cave, it must be observed, applies only to a
single passage. It is a labyrinth of branches,
of which the principal one is two miles and
a half long. There are two or three others
of nearly half that length. The extent of
all the passages, taken together, is between
eight and nine miles. There are, besides,
many which have never been explored, and
perhaps never will be—some opening in the
sides, and at the bottoms, of pits that would
appal a samphire-gatherer or an Orkney fowler;
others, of which there are countless
numbers, opening by orifices so narrow that
nothing but blasting with gunpowder can
ever render them practicable; and perhaps as
many more, accessible and convenient enough,
but whose entrances, concealed among rocks
and cranmies, no lucky accident has yet discovered.
The Deserted Chambers, forming
a considerable portion of the whole cave, and
now accessible through two different approaches,
have only been known for a comparatively
brief number of years; and the
Solitary Cave, with its groves of spar, its

pools, and springs, and hollow-sounding floors,
is a still more recent discovery.

The survey of the cave, as far as it is now
known, we owe to Mr. Edmund F. Lee, an
engineer of Cincinnati, who has executed his
task with skill and fidelity. The difficulties,
labours—I might even say, the dangers—of
his enterprise (in which he was occupied, I
believe, three or four months—the whole winter
of 1834-5,) can only be appreciated by
those who are familiarly acquainted with the
cave. The exploit of surveying and levelling
eight or nine miles of cavern appears to me
unprecedented. Mr. Lee's Map, with the libretto
of “Notes” accompanying it, published
in Cincinnati by James and Gazlay, interesting
alike to the lovers of romance and of
science, is a curious and valuable production,
which I cordially recommend to my readers
and the public.

The Mammoth Cave lies upon Green
River, in a corner of Edmonson county, Kentucky,
in the heart of the district long known
as the Barrens—a vast extent of rolling hills
and knobs, once bare and naked—prairies, in
fact, as they were sometimes called—but now
overshadowed by a young forest of black-jacks
and other trees that delight in an arid

soil. The whole country is one bed of limestone,
with as many caverns below as there
are hills above, both seeming to have been
formed at the same moment, and by the same
cause—some primeval convulsion by which
the rocky substratum was torn to pieces, and
the knobs heaped up. That earthquakes had
something to do in carving out the caves of
the West, no one will doubt who has clambered
among those prodigious blocks of stone
—masses which to move would have puzzled a
Pelasgian builder of old—that lie strewn about
the floors of the Mammoth Cave, shivered from
the roofs and walls by some violent concussion.
The earthquakes that formed them, seem
however, not always to have opened the ragged
fissures to the air: that was left to another
agency—the infiltration, in most instances,
of water, by which the thinner and
weaker portions of the crust were gradually
disintegrated, and finally swept into
the interior. The Mammoth Cave itself
was evidently opened in this way, in remote
times, after remaining sealed up for
a long series of centuries; and in this case,
as in most others, the mass of falling rocks,
sinking across a spacious excavation, has
been sufficient to block it up in one direction,
while yielding easy access in the other. The
Horse-shoe Cave, however, a grotto twelve
or fifteen miles distant from the Mammoth
—is an instance in which the roof has fallen,
without obstructing the passage on either
side: you enter the cave, as it were, by a side
door, and may penetrate with equal ease to
the right hand or the left. In many cases,
there seem to exist caverns with no roof of
rock at all, the fissure having extended to the
top of the limestone, where it is covered over
only by a thin layer of soil. It is not altogether
an uncommon thing for a traveller in
Kentucky to play the Curtius, and plunge,
horse and man, into the bowels of the earth
at a moment when he feels neither patriotic
nor heroical, but very much like any other
mortal. It was but two years ago that a
gentleman of Lexington, ambling over his
fields, in the neighbourhood of that city, surveying
his stacks of hemp, and speculating
perhaps, like a philanthropist, upon the number
of rascals his crop might be expected to
hang, suddenly found himself sinking into the
earth, whirling in a Maelstrom of clay and
stones; from which, however, he succeeded
in extricating himself by leaping briskly from
his horse. The animal sank to a depth of
one hundred and fifty feet, where he became
wedged between two rocks, the sides of a
cavern, and perished. A similar accident
happened in the Barrens of which I speak, as
early as 1795, when a planter of West Tennessee
lost his horse, and saved himself, in
the same way; only, that on this occasion,
the animal tumbled into a more spacious
cavern, in which he walked about until starved
to death.

But let us hasten to the cave. It is midsummer.
It was at that season, several
years ago, I made my first (it was not my
only) visit to the cave. It was the close of
merry June—merry, yet not merry, for the
pestilence was then abroad in the land, and
men were thinking and talking of nothing
but cholera—when I, with an excellent friend,
(alas! now no more,) who was as eager as
myself to escape to some nook where cholera
was unknown, where our ears should be no
longer pained, nor our souls sickened by
“every day's report” of cases—made my way
to the heart of the Barrens, and in good time,
one bright morning, found myself approaching
the Mammoth Cave. The air was hot
upon the hill-tops, hotter still in the little valleys
that, with their lowly cabins of logs, and

smiling, though half-cultivated corn-fields, presented
here and there a few demi-oases in
the desert of black-jacks, through which we
were jogging: there was no breeze in the forest,
but there was note of preparation among
the white and sable-silvered clouds aloft, that
now sent a heavy rain-drop pashing in our
faces and now woke the woods with rattling
peals of thunder. But what cared we for shower
or bolt? We were vagabondizing among
the knobs; and, by and by, we should be
under the canopy of the cave, deep in vaults
where the rain beats not and the thunder
is never heard. We are even now riding
over its labyrinthine halls: each of these rocky
hills is arched over one of its gloomy vaults;
and it is in a glen upon the side of the very
knob, on whose flat, plain-like summit we are
now coursing to our journey's end, we are to
find its darksome portals. Under this mouldering
stile of logs, where we leave our Rozinantes,
rejoiced to escape their excruciating
backs, under this venerable, rickety porch,
where we pause a moment to look around, at
a depth of a hundred feet below, is one of
the hugest chambers of the cave. The guide
prepares his iron torches, his bucket of oil—
or, to speak less poetically, his bucket of lard,
(for here the fat of Leviathan is unknown,)
and his basket of provisions; while we, exhorting
him to despatch, set off to explore
the mysteries of the glen, the redoubtable
Cave-Hollow, ourselves.

But first let us seduce honest Bull, the
great dog that has been wagging his tail at
us in token of friendship, to lead us to the
cavern. “You may get him into the Hollow,”
quoth the guide, nodding his head; “but you
won't get him into the cave; because dogs
are exactly the people that won't go in, no
way you can fix it.—They have a horror of
it.”—Verily, after we had ourselves got in, and
seen the last glimmer of fading daylight swallowed
up in midnight gloom, we began to
think Bull's discretion not so very extraordinary.
There actually is a point at which
dogs begin to think of themselves in preference
to their masters. I once saw a hulking
cur, who boasted the same name Bull—as all
big dogs, except Newfoundland ones, do—attempt
to follow his master over the bridge
above the falls of Niagara. It was a fine
sunshiny day, and Bull, being in a joyous humour,
had gallopped a hundred yards or so
along the bridge, without much thinking of
where he was or whither going. But on a

sudden the idea struck his mind, or whatever
part of him served for mind; he stopped, applied
his nose to a crack in the planks, and
made a dead set at the horrible green and
white billows beneath. “Come on, Bull!”
cried his master from afar. “If I do,” said
Bull, “I wish I may —;” not that he actually
said so much in words, but it was written
in his eye. His tail fell, his ears began to
to rise, he stole a sidelong look at the waters
above and the waters below; and planted himself
in the centre of the bridge, from which
he refused to budge, except upon hard jostling,
even to let myself get by. His master
called again and again; and I believe Bull
made some small effort to advance, stepping
slowly and carefully forward, as if treading
upon eggs. He did not, however, proceed
far; and when I saw him last, he had come
to a second stand, and was again surveying
the boiling surges through the gaps of the
planks, looking volumes of mute terror and
perplexity. How he ever got to firm land
again I know not; for he was evidently as
much afraid to return as to advance.

Were there indeed such horrors in the
Mammoth Cave as should make a dog a
coward on instinct? The thought sharpened

our expectations, and we were the more
eager to make its acquaintance.

And now let us descend the Cave-Hollow
—a ravine that begins a mere gully at first,
but, widening and deepening as you proceed,
becomes at last, on the banks of the river,
half a mile to the west, a valley that might
almost be called spacious. It is bounded by
ledges of calcareous rock overlaid by sandstone,
which, in some places, assume the appearance
of precipices, and, in others, are
piled together in loose blocks. Along the
line of wall thus bounding the valley, spring
tall oak-trees and chestnuts, rooted among
the rocks; while elms, and walnuts, maples
and papaws, and a thousand other trees, with
vines, weeds, brambles, and many a glaring
wild-flower, occupy the depths of the hollow,
shutting it out almost as much from the blue
heaven above as its rocky walls seclude it
from the habitable earth around. A brook
that runs when the clouds run, and at no
other period, has ploughed a rugged channel
down one side of the glen; and along its
banks or in its parched bed, as seems most
convenient, we make our way, looking for the
cave, which refuses to be found; hiding from
the sun, which, however, neither the scudding

thunder-clouds nor the embowering tree-tops
can wholly keep from our visages; and sighing
for something to “allay the burning
quality” of the atmosphere, some cool breeze
stirred by the wing of Favonius from fountain-side
or brim, some—But soft! we have
our wish; a cool breeze does at last breathe
over our cheeks; it rolls a gentle and invisible
stream, a river of air, down the valley.
On that grassy terrace above, we shall enjoy
it. On that grassy terrace we step, and
the cave yawns before us!—The breeze, at
first so cool, and now so icy, comes from its
marble jaws; it is the breath of the monster.

How dark, how dismal, how dreary! The
platform sinks abruptly under your feet, forming
a steep and broken declivity of thirty or
more feet in descent, and as much in width.
From the bottom of the abyss thus formed,
springs an arch, whose top is on a level lower
even than your feet, while the massive rock
that crowns it is on a plane which you can
still overlook. The cave is therefore under
your feet, you look down upon it; it is subterraneous
even at its entrance; and this is a
circumstance which adds double solemnity
and horror to its appearance. In other respects
its aspect is haggard and ghastly in

the extreme. The gray rocks, consisting of
thick horizontal plates, forming ledges and
galleries along the sides; the long grasses,
the nodding ferns, the green mosses and lichens,
that have fastened among their crannies;
the pit immediately under the spring of
the arch, loosely choked with beams, planks,
earth and stones; the stream of crystal water,
oozing from the mosses on the face of the
crowning rock, and falling with a wild pattering
sound upon the ruins below; the dismal
blackness of the vacuity, in which objects are
obscurely traced only for a few fathoms; and
the ever-breathing blast, so cold, so strange,
so sepulchre-like; form together a picture of
desolation and gloom inconceivably awful
and repelling. Indeed, instances not unfrequently
occur where visiters are so much
overcome by its appearance, as to fall back
upon their instincts, like honest Bull the dog,
and refuse to enter it altogether. A singular
addition is given to its dreariness by the presence
of several mouldering beams of wood
stretched across the mouth from ledge to
ledge, and two tottering chimneys of stone,
behind the cotton-wood tree on the right
hand; the ruins of old saltpetre works, the
manufacture of which villanous compound, in
the last war, was carried on to a great extent
in the cave. But peace came, and with
it those curses of trade, low prices, by which
the manufacturers were scattered to the
winds, and the Mammoth Cave again left to
its solitude. But that is its proper condition.
A city at Niagara, a factory in the Mammoth
Cave, are consummations of enterprising ambition
only to be hoped for by men whose
hearts are of gold and silver, and their nerves
and brains of the dross thereof.

How dark, how dismal, how dreary! One
would think that no living creature, save man
alone, the lover of romance and adventure,
would willingly enter this horrible pit. Yet
a swallow has built her nest under the grim
arch; and as she darts with flashing wing
through the thin waters of the falling brook,
and turns gamesomely about, and darts
through them again and again, her twittering
cries are as full of jocund mirth as of music.
What is it to her that all around is darkness,
fear, and desolation? The chirping of her
young from the shattered roof makes the
cave her paradise. And that little lizard, striped
with azure and scarlet,that dances around
the trunk of the stunted crab-apple growing on
the face of the descent—the most beautiful,

delicate, graceful, resplendent, mischievous
little rascal my eyes ever beheld—he mocks
me, but he will not let me catch him!—there
is something here, though what I know not,
to make the chill, moist entrance of the cave
more delighiful even to him than the gray,
heated rocks above, where his comrades are
basking. And yet the lizard and swallow are
frisking at the mouth of a sepulchre. The
nitre taken from this cave was dug from
among the bones of buried Indians. If we
can believe the account of those who should
know best, many a generation of dead men
sleeps among the vaults of the Mammoth
Cave. Perhaps this thought, busy in the
mind of the visiter, invests its aspect with a
more awful solemnity than it really possesses.

3. CHAPTER III.

But let us descend. The guide has arrived;
the swinging torches are tied each to its
staff, and lighted; our canteens are filled from
the trough that receives the crystal brook,
and all is ready for the subterranean journey.
Enter the mighty portal—

the gloom. How ragged and shivered is the
broken roof above, as if those aforesaid giants
with the “turbands” on had been employed
to rough-hew the arch. But the floor is firm,
dry, smooth clay: so far we owe thanks to
the nitre-diggers, who have constructed a
path—it almost might be called a carriage-road—half
a mile into the cave.

Over this path, ringing with sonorous clang
to every footstep, facing full to the east—yet
what an east! an Orient that never knew a
dawn—the thunder roaring behind us, (for
the storm has at last burst,) and the gust of
the cave murmuring hollow in front, we
trudge along; until, sixty paces from the dripping-spring,
we find ourselves at the Narrows,
where the roof is but seven or eight
feet high, and the width of the cave not
much greater. The passage has been still
further contracted by a wall built up by the
miners, leaving only a narrow door-way, that
was formerly provided with a leaf to exclude
the cold air of winter. Here, if the nervous
visiter has not been appalled at the entrance,
he will perhaps be dismayed by the furious
blast rushing like a winter tempest through
the door. Its strength is indeed astonishing.
It deprives him of breath, and, what is worse,
of light; the torches are blown out; they are
relighted and again extinguished: we must
grope our way through in the dark, and trust
to flint and steel. It is done: once through

the narrow door, and the wind appals no
longer. All is calm and still, a few feet within
the wall; it is only at the contracted gap
that we feel the fury of the current. In the
winter, or at any other period of cold weather,
the blast is reversed; the current is then inwards.

There are numerous caves in America, as
well as in other parts of the world, which
exhibit the phenomena of the blast; and this
has usually been reckoned one of their chief
wonders. It has given rise among philosophers
to a deal of fanciful theory, which,
perhaps, would never have been indulged in,
had not observers in the first place mystified
the whole subject by recording facts that only
existed in their imagination. Thus, some
caves are said to blow in and out, without
much regard to the state of the weather, a wonder
which was only to be explained by supposing
the existence of intermitting fountains—
that is, of vast pools alternately rising and falling,
and so, by increasing or diminishing the
space within, expelling or inhaling the air;
while others again were reported to blow out
perpetually—as in the case of the cave at the
Panther Gap in Virginia, described by Mr.
Jefferson. This cave Mr. Jefferson, I

think, could never have seen, as he describes
it (in very loose terms, it must be confessed)
as having an entrance “of about one hundred
feet diameter;” whereas all travellers
represent the outlet as being quite small.
Allowing that he describes it on mere hear-say,
we need attach no great weight to his
assertion, that the current “is strongest in dry,
frosty weather, and weakest in long spells of
rain.” That it does blow in the summer is
well ascertained; that it blows at all in winter,
I feel strongly disposed to doubt, having
heard that part of the story contradicted
by a person residing in the neighbourhood of
the Gap. Our opinion is, that all caves of
any magnitude blow; that the blast becomes
perceptible only when the outlet is very small;
that it is in all caves alike—the blast being
outward in hot, and inward in cold weather;
and that to understand the mystery, nothing
more is required than to place a candle in a
door communicating betwixt a very warm
and a very cold room, holding it first near
the floor, when a cold current will be found
rushing into the warm room, and then near
the lintel, where a warm current will be
found rushing out. In other words, we think
that there is a double current flowing, Mediterranean-wise,
at the mouth of every cave,
and flowing always, except when the temperatures
within and without are the same;
a cold current at the bottom rushing out in
summer, and in during the winter, and a warm
one above flowing in the contrary direction,
a perpetual circulation of air being thus kept
up. This is an idea, which, being too simple
and natural to be readily conceived, did
not occur to us when it was in our power to
verify or disprove it at the Mammoth Cave,
as we had many opportunities to do. Our
mind, in fact, on all such occasions, was engaged
with a sublimer idea. We thought of
musical strings—a great æolian lyre—
stretched across the door, and waked to majestic
music by the breath of the cave—such
solemn strains as were poured by the “ingenious
instrument” of Belarius over the dying
Imogen.

Bur we have passed the windy gap, and
are in the cave, where all is silence and tranquillity.
The thunder is still raving in the
upper air, but its peals already come faintly
to the ear: a few more steps and they will be
inaudible. With a rock a hundred feet thick
over our heads, we can defy their fury, and
forget it. Armies of a hundred thousand

men might fight a Waterloo on the hills
above, and we know nothing of it. At least,
we should hear neither drum nor trumpet,
nor sound of artillery; though cascades of
blood, falling where we are to find only cascades
of water, might impart the hideous secret.
Our torches are relighted, making
each
which we take care to direct to the sounding
floor, to watch our footing, satisfied, after
one or two eager efforts to penetrate the
gloom that has now invested us, that nothing
is to be seen until we have got out cave eyes.
We catch, to be sure, a dim glance, now and
then, of a low roof almost touching our heads,
of two rugged walls that are ever and anon
rude to our elbows; one of them—that is,
one of the walls—the workmanship of Nature
herself, though of Nature in no pains-taking
mood, the other piled up on the left hand by
the nitre-diggers of old, who were thus wont
to dispose of the loose rocks that came in
their way. You are sensible you are thridding
a path as narrow as the road of Honour,—

and you begin to have your doubts whether
the Mammoth Cave is, after all, all it has been
represented to be. You get tired even of
admiring the musical ringings of the guide's
footsteps on the hard earthen floor; you are
sure you have trudged a quarter of a mile
already, (the guide assures you, half a mile,)
along this dismal, low, narrow, stupid passage;
you become impatient; you demand “if
there is nothing better to be seen;” and the
guide, answering by bidding you look to your
footing—which, however, you are doing of
your own accord, the path having suddenly
become broken—at last directs you to pause,
and look around.—What now do you see?

What now do we see? Midnight—the
blackness of darkness—nothing! Where are
we? where is the wall we were lately elbowing
out of the way? It has vanished, it is
lost; we are walled in by darkness, and darkness
canopies us above. Look again; swing
your torches aloft! Ay, now you can see it,
far up, a hundred feet above your head, a gray
ceiling rolling dimly away like a cloud; and
heavy buttresses, bending under the weight,
curling and toppling over their base, begin to

project their enormous masses from the shadowy
wall. How vast, how solemn, how
awful! And how silent, how dreadfully silent!
The little bells of the brain are ringing
in your ears; you hear nothing clse, not even
a sigh of air, not even the echo of a drop of
water falling from the roof. The guide triumphs
in your looks of amazement and awe,
he takes advantage of your feelings all so
solemn and romantic:—“Them that says the
Mammoth ain't a rale tear-cat don't know
nothing about it!”—

With which truly philosophic interjection,
he falls to work on certain old wooden ruins,
to you yet invisible, and builds a brace or
two of fires; by the aid of which you begin
to have a better conception of the scene
around you. You are in the Vestibule, or
ante-chamber, to which the spacious entrance
of the cave and the narrow passage that
succeeds it, should be considered the mere
gateway and covered approach. It is a basilica
of an oval figure, two hundred feet in
length by one hundred and fifty wide, with a
roof, which is as flat and level as if finished
by the trowel of the plasterer, of fifty or sixty,
or even more, feet in height. Two passages,
each a hundred feet in width, open

into it at its opposite extremities, but in right
angles to each other; and as they preserve a
straight course for five or six hundred feet,
with the same flat roof common to each, the
appearance to the eye is that of a vast hall
in shape of the letter L, expanded at the
angle, both branches being five hundred feet
long by a hundred wide. The passage on
the right hand is the Great Bat Room; that
in front, the beginning of the Grand Gallery,
or the main cavern itself. The whole of this
prodigious space is covered by a single rock,
in which the eye can detect no break or interruption,
save at its borders, where is a
broad sweeping cornice, traced in horizontal
panel-work, exceedingly noble and regular;
and not a single pier or pillar of any kind
contributes to support it. It needs no support;
it is like the arched and ponderous
roof of the poet's mausoleum,
The floor is very irregularly broken, consisting
of vast heaps of the nitrous earth, and of
the ruins of the hoppers, or vats, composed
of heavy planking, in which the miners were
accustomed to leach it. This hall was, in
fact, one of their chief factory rooms. Before
their day, it was a cemetery; and here they
disinterred many a mouldering skeleton, belonging,
it seems, to that gigantic eight or
nine feet race of men of past days, whose
jaw-bones so many thousand veracious persons
have clapped over their own, like horse-collars,
without laying by a single one to
convince the soul of scepticism.

Such is the Vestibule of the Mammoth
Cave—a hall which hundreds of visitors have
passed through without being conscious of
its existence. The path leading into the
Grand Gallery hugs the wall on the left hand,
and is, besides, in a hollow, flanked on the
right hand by lofty mounds of earth, which
the visiter, if he looks at them at all, as he
will scarcely do at so early a period after
entering, will readily suppose to be the opposite
walls. Those who enter the Bat Rooms
—into which flying visiters are seldom conducted—will
indeed have some faint suspicion,
for a moment, that they are passing through
infinite space; but the walls of the cave being
so dark as not to reflect one single ray of
light from the dim torches, and a greater
number of them being necessary to disperse
the gloom than are usually employed, they

will still remain in ignorance of the grandeur
around them. In an attempt which we made
to secure a drawing of the Vestibule, we had
it lighted up with a dozen or more torches
and flambeaux, and two or three bonfires beside;
but still the obscurity was so great that
it was necessary, in sketching any one part,
to have the torches for the time held before
it. It was, in fact, impossible to light it up
so as to embrace all its striking features in
one view. We saw enough of it, however,
to determine its quality. It possesses not
one particle of beauty; but its grandeur, its
air of desolation combined with majesty, are
unspeakably impressive.

4. CHAPTER IV.

But let us enter the Bat Rooms—the Big
Bat room and the Little one—the latter being
a narrow branch of the former, remarkable
only for its two pits, one of which, the
Crevice Pit, is the deepest that has been
measured in the whole cave.

The Big Bat Room is about one third of a
mile long, counting from its entrance, which
is not half a mile as is generally supposed,
but just three hundred yards from the mouth
of the cave. It is interesting only from its
width and height, which it preserves nearly
to the end unimpaired. It terminates in
mounds of massive sandstone, that, with the
assistance of water ever dripping through

them, have crushed in the roof, leaving a
shadowy dome above them. The Little Bat
Room opens in its left wall, six or seven hundred
feet from the Vestibule. It is long,
winding, low, and deep; and was once the
bed of a torrent that has worn its walls into
a thousand figures, with numerous winding
holes which lead perhaps into other caverns,
but are too small to be entered. It is now
dry, like other parts of the cave, and blackened
by age, or by the smoke of the torches
of the ancient inhabitants of the cave and the
miners. Within but a few feet of its extremity,
there are two low-browed niches, one
in each wall, nearly opposite each other, the
blackest, ugliest looking places in the whole
world, particularly that on the left hand,
which is a hundred times blacker and uglier
than the other. One feels an instinctive horror
of this place at the very first look, and
perceives a crab-like inclination in his legs
to sidle away from it, if not to beat a retreat
altogether. There never was better occasion
for instinct. Under that niche, down to
which the rocky floor you stand on so treacherously
inclines, is a pit three hundred feet
deep—ay, by'r lady! and perhaps three times
three hundred more to the back of them, if
not three times three thousand—who can
tell? Mr. Lee struck bottom at two hundred
and eighty feet; but, as in the case of the
Bottomless Pit, to be spoken of hereafter, a
stone thrown down tells quite another story.
Bang, bang, rattle, rattle, bang, bang again,
down it goes; now loud, now low, now loud
again, and then softer and softer, until the
sound gradually becomes inaudible. One
false step on this villanous floor, and the thing
is settled. You roll over, as a matter of
course; and, as another matter of course,
that hideous niche receives you into its jaws,
ever gaping for prey, like the jaws of a sleeping
alligator in fly time; and then comes the
plunge of the three hundred feet, the crashing
of bone and flesh, the—pah!

But let us sit down by its brink; the guide
has many a wild and dreary story to tell,
which can be best told in such a place as
this.

And, first, he tells us that this identical
abyss—the Crevice Pit, as it is called—
sounded by Mr. Lee in 1835, with a string
having a stone tied to the end of it, was
sounded, many a long year before, by the
miners, pretty much in the same way; only
that, instead of a stone to the string, they

had a young negro tied to the end of it.
However, this highly original plummet, it
appears, was tied on with its own consent,
the lad being a bold romantic fellow, ambitious
to signalize himself by a daring exploit,
and perhaps a brilliant discovery. Down,
therefore, into the pit they lowered him;
though with an effect singularly resembling
that attending the Knight of La Mancha's
descent into the cave of Montesinos. The
rope suddenly became light, its burden had
vanished; though, in due course of time, it
again felt heavy in the hands of the miners,
who, drawing it up, found the adventurer at
its end as before. Some very wondrous
story he told them, with great glee, of his
having discovered, fifty or sixty feet below,
a spacious and splendid cave, in which he
had walked; but as he never after could be,
by any persuasions, induced to attempt a
second descent, it was thought he had imitated
Don Quixote to the letter, ensconced
himself on the first convenient ledge or shelf,
and dreamed the remainder of the adventure.

The Mammoth Cave, as I observed, was
wrought for saltpetre during the last war,
when the price of that article was so high,

and the profits of the manufacturer so great,
as to set half the western world gadding
after nitre caves—the gold mines of their
day. Cave hunting, in fact, became a kind
of mania, beginning with speculators, and
ending with hair-brained young men, who
dared from the love of adventure the risks
that others ran for profit. As might be expected,
this passion was not always indulged
without accident; and several caves in Kentucky
and Tennessee obtained a mournful celebrity
as the scenes of painful suffering and disaster.
In some cases, caves have been entered
by explorers who were never again known to
leave them, and around whose fate yet hangs
the deepest mystery. Accidents, not attended
with loss of life, were of frequent occurrence;
and, as for frights, they were lumped
together in report, in the style of a constable's
inventory, as too tedious to mention.

Among the tragical incidents illustrative
of the time and the mania, told by the guide
at the Crevice Pit, the following I consider
worthy of being recorded, and the more so
as it occurred within the immediate vicinity,
and had therefore gained nothing by

Four or five miles from the Mammoth
Cave, a few paces from the bridle-path over
the Knobs, by which the visiter coming from
Bell's at the Three Forks, reaches it, is a
cave known as the Pit Cave, though sometimes
called, I believe, Wright's Cave, after
the name of the person who first attempted
to explore it. This man was a speculator,
who having some reason to believe the cave
a valuable one, resolved to examine it; but
possessing little knowledge of caves and less
of the business of the nitre-maker, he applied
to Mr. Gatewood, the proprietor of the works
at the Mammoth Cave, and of course experienced
in both these particulars, to assist
him in the search. A day was accordingly
appointed, on which Mr. Gatewood agreed
to meet him at the cave, and conduct the exploration
in person. But on that day, as it
happened, there arose a furious storm of rain
and thunder; and Mr. Gatewood, not supposing
that even Wright himself would, under
such circumstances, keep the appointment,
remained at his own works. In the meanwhile,
however, Wright had reached the cave,
in company with another man, a miner, though
of no great experience in cave-hunting; and
with him, finding that Mr. Gatewood did not

come, and having made all his preparations,
he resolved to undertake the exploration himself.
This the two men commenced, and
pursued for several hours without accident
and without fear, seeing, indeed, nothing to
excite alarm, except a cluster of very dangerous
pits, which they passed while engaged in
the search. But by and by, having consumed
much time in rambling about, they discovered
that by some extraordinary oversight,
they had left their store of candles at the
mouth of the cave, having brought in with
them only those they carried in their hands,
which were now burning low. The horrors
of their situation at once flashed on their
minds; they were at a great distance from
the entrance, which there was little hope they
could reach with what remained of their
candles, and the terrible pits were directly on
their path. It was thought, however, that if
they could succeed in passing these, it might
be possible to grope their way from the cave
in the dark, as the portion beyond the pits
offered no unusual interruptions, and was
without branches. The attempt was made;
and as desperation gave speed to their feet,
they had, at last, the inexpressible satisfaction
to reach the pits, and to pass them in
safety, leaving them several hundred feet behind,
ere their lights entirely failed. But now
began their difficulties. In the confusion and
agitation of mind which beset them at the
moment when the last candle expired, they
neglected to set their faces firmly towards
the entrance; and in consequence, when darkness
at last suddenly surrounded them, they
were bewildered and at variance, Wright
vehemently insisting that they should proceed
in one direction, the miner contending
with equal warmth that the other was the
right one. The violence of Wright prevailed
over the doubts of his follower, who allowed
himself to be governed by the former,
especially when the desperate man offered to
lead the way, so as to be the first to encounter
the pits, supposing he should be wrong.
An expedient for testing the safety of the
path, which Wright hit upon, had also its
effect on his companion's mind; he proposed,
as he crawled along on his hands and feet—
the only way they dare attempt to proceed in
the dark over the broken floor—to throw
stones before him, by means of which it would
be easy to tell when a pit lay in the way. The
miner, accordingly, though with many misgivings,
suffered himself to be ruled, and followed
at Wright's heels, the latter every moment
hurling a stone before him, and at every
throw uttering some hurried exclamation, now
a prayer, now a word of counsel or encouragement
to his companion, though always expressive
of the deepest agitation and disorder
of mind. They had proceeded in this way
for several moments, until even the miner
himself, believing that if they were in error,
they had crawled far enough to reach the pits,
became convinced his employer was in the
right path; when suddenly the clang of one of
the stones cast by Wright, falling as if on the
solid floor, was succeeded by a rushing sound,
the clatter of loose rocks rolling down a declivity,
and then a heavy hollow crash at a
depth beneath. He called to Wright; no answer
was returned; all was dismal silence;
not even a groan from the wretched employer
replied to the call. His fate the terrified miner
understood in a moment: the first of the
pits was, at one part of its brink, shelving;
on the declivity thus formed, the stone cast
by Wright had lodged; but Wright had slipped
from it into the pit, and slipped so suddenly
as not to have time to utter even one
cry of terror. The miner, overcome with
horror, after calling again and again without
receiving any answer, or hearing any sound
whatever, turned in the opposite direction, and
endeavoured to effect his own escape from
the cave. He wandered about many hours,
now sinking down in despair, now struggling
again for life; until at last yielding to his fate
in exhaustion of mind and body, incapable of
making any further exertions, a sudden ray
of light sparkled in his face. He rushed forward—it
was the morning-star shining through
the mouth of the cave! The alarm was immediately
given. Mr. Gatewood, with a
party of his labourers, hurried to the cave
and to the pit, on whose shelving edge
were seen evidences enough of some heavy
body having lately rolled into it. The offer
of a reward conquered the terror of one of
the workmen, who was lowered with ropes
to the bottom of the pit, a depth of fifty or
sixty feet; and Wright's lifeless body was
drawn out.

The above tragical incident I have heard
confirmed by the lips of several different persons;
one of whom, however, contested the
right of the morning-star to figure in it;
affirming that the miner made his way out
before night, and that it was the light of day,
shining at a distance like a star, which gave

rise to that poetical embellishment. I believe
he was right. It is thus, like a star—the
loveliest of all the lamps that spangle the
vault of night—that daylight breaks from
afar upon the adventurer, returning from the
depths of the Mammoth Cave.

5. CHAPTER V.

Among other stories told at the Crevice
Pit, was one—wild, and terrible enough, if
true—of a man who, in former days, was
master of a little tavern on a public road,
some twenty miles off; at which place of entertainment,
it began to be remarked by the
neighbours, more travellers called than were
ever known to leave it. Immediately behind
the house, not fifty yards from the road, is a
cavern, which, if its interior corresponds with
its entrance, must be of uncommon grandeur.
It opens from the level ground, by a sink or
declivity like that of the Mammoth Cave;
but the descent is much less precipitous, as

well as wider and longer, making a wild little
glen, studded with rocks, bushes, and trees,
that terminates under a vast, marble-looking
arch, the mouth of the cave. The view from
this mouth, looking back to the glen, is inexpressibly
grand and beautiful—a vista, or
picture, one might fancy, of a waste nook of
Paradise, set or framed in a grotto-work of
stone. The cavern is said to continue only
for about a hundred yards, when it is sudderly
lost in a vast pit of unknown depth.

The keeper of the Cave Inn the story represents
as a dark villain, accustomed to rob
and murder all travellers rich enough to reward
his trouble; for which purpose, as well
as for that of concealment, the cave behind the
house afforded him unusual facilities. His plan
of proceedings, when he had resolved the death
of a traveller, was, first, under the plea of
looking after the victim's horse, before going
to bed, to lead the animal from the stable
into the cave, and force him into the pit; then,
with an appearance of concern, to inform the
traveller his beast had strayed into the cave
among the rocks, whence he could not remove
him without assistance; and thus obtain the
latter to accompany him into the infernal den;
where, arriving at the chasm, a sudden blow

or push precipitated the human victim also
into the gulf, and with him all evidence of the
crime by which he had perished.

This horrible story I afterwards heard repeated
by other persons, some of whom declared
that the innkeeper's villany had been
finally brought to light by the confessions of
an agonized wife, the witness, though not the
accomplice, of his murders; while others
thought that his guilt rested merely upon suspicion,
for which the sudden disappearance
of several travellers unfortunately gave too
many grounds. I must confess that none of
my informants were very positive in their
modes of telling the story, and none able to
vouch for its truth; while one cautious, or
judicious, personage professed an entire disbelief
in the innkeeper's guilt, hinting that
the whole story had grown out of the wild
prattling of a woman, the poor man's wife,
who was, in the narrator's opinion, a mere
unhappy lunatic. The tale, however, had
currency enough to give the suspected man
trouble, and he soon afterwards left the country,
and was no more heard of.

But let us retrace our steps to the Vestibule;
let us enter the Grand Gallery; for we

have yet much to see—or rather, we have all
to see—and much to hear.

The Grand Gallery is a hundred feet wide,
with an average height of forty or fifty. Its
roof is, for the most part, flat and regular; its
walls broken by massive buttresses, that here
and there stare out of the gloom, and salute
us with a rocky frown. Fancy traces among
them a thousand majestic resemblances to
scenes recollected, or imagined, in the external
world. On the right hand, we see the
Rocky Mountains—the Chippewyan in little,
without the superfluous caps of snow; on the
left, the Cliffs of Kentucky—excellent likenesses
all, as far as crags fifty feet high, bare
and desolate, and shrouded in never-ending
night, can resemble cliffs of three hundred
feet, adorned with trees and flowers, shining
like marble in the brave sunshine, and glassing
their beauty in the crystal river below.
Among these Kentucky cliffs, just under the
ceiling, is a gap in the wall, into which you
can scramble, and make your way down a
chaotic gulf, creeping like a rat under and
among huge loose rocks, to a depth of eighty
or ninety feet—that is, you can do all this,
provided you do not break your neck before
you get half way.

A hundred yards further on, the roof suddenly
sinks somewhat, forming an inclined
plane, on which clouds seem to float as in a
midnight sky. And here Nature, who, in
these same clouds, proves that she is not so
good a painter below the earth as she is
above, has scooped out a spacious cove on
the left hand, as wide and high as the Grand
Gallery into which it opens, but of little more
than a hundred feet in extent. Here, among
rude rocks, has been constructed a still ruder
altar—a wooden desk, or pulpit; from which,
while torches shone around from crag to
crag, the preacher has proclaimed the word
of God, and the voices of a congregation
have arisen in solemn hosannas. The services
of worship in such a place must have
been strangely and profoundly impressive. It
is a cathedral which, man feels, has been piled,
not by the art of man, but by the will of his
Maker. But it is a place to inculcate religious
fear, rather than pious affection.

Another hundred yards beyond the Church
—for so the cove of the pulpit is called—and
you find yourself again among the ruins of
nitre works. The spacious floor is occupied
with vats filled in with earth, which is now,
however, beginning to sink, giving to the

place somewhat the air of an ancient and
neglected cemetery—a cemetery of Brobdignags.
A tall frame-work of timbers, that
once supported a forcing pump, is yet standing
in the midst. Opposite to it, a ladder is
seen resting against the right hand wall.
Looking up, you perceive a gap in the wall
fifty feet wide, and twenty high, with several
huge rocks lying in it, one of them looking
like a tower commanding the savage pass.
This is the entrance of the Haunted Chambers.

6. CHAPTER VI.

We have arrived, then, at the entrance of
the Haunted Chambers—a distance of barely
half a mile from the mouth of the cave; and
we have still seven or eight miles of wonders
before us. To describe these in detail would
be an endless undertaking, and, to the reader
a dull and unprofitable one—as no description,
however minute, could possibly convey
accurate ideas of them. In fact, an extended
description of a cave would, in any case,
prove wearisome. The components—the
elements of caves are few and simple—rocks,
stalactites, pools, pits, and darkness make up

all their variety; and however interestingly,
and even variously, these may be combined
to the eye of an actual spectator, the descriptions
of them must consist of repetitions
of the same words—of changes rung over
and over again upon the same ideas. My
aim is, therefore, not so much to describe the
Mammoth Cave in detail, as to present a
general idea of it, pausing to dwell, here and
there, upon features that are most important
and interesting, and upon the impressions
produced by them on the visiter's mind.

But let us, before resuming our explorations,
say a word of the atmosphere of the
cave; which, having been, at the entrance,
pronounced so icy, it may be feared, still retains
its hyperborean character. It is icy,
however, as we soon discover, only by contrast.
The transition from an atmosphere
of 90 or 95 degrees without, into one of
about 55 or 60 within the cave, may well
make us shiver for a moment. The average
temperature of the Mammoth Cave is about
58 degrees Fahr. In summer it rises a few
degrees higher, and in winter sinks as many
below. It is, therefore, always temperate.
Its purity, judging from its effects upon the
lungs, and from other circumstances, is remarkable,

though in what its purity consists
I know not. But be its composition what it
may, it is certain, that its effects upon the
spirits and bodily powers of visiters are extremely
exhilarating; and that it is not less
salubrious than enlivening. The nitre-diggers
were a famously healthy set of men: it was a
common and humane practice to employ
labourers of enfeebled constitutions, who were
soon restored to health and strength, though
kept at constant labour; and more joyous,
merry fellows were never seen. The oxen,
of which several were kept, day and night, in
the cave hauling the nitrous earth, were, after
a month or two of toil, in as fine condition
for the shambles as if fattened in the stall.
The ordinary visiter, though rambling a
dozen hours or more over paths of the roughest
and most difficult kinds, is seldom conscious
of fatigue, until he returns to the upper
air; and then it seems to him, at least in the
summer season, that he has exchanged the
atmosphere of paradise for that of a charnel
warmed by steam, all, without, is so heavy,
so dank, so dead, so mephitic. Awe, and
even apprehension, if that has been felt, soon
yield to the influence of the delicious air of
the cave; and, after a time, a certain jocund
feeling is found mingled with the deepest impressions
of sublimity, which there are so
many objects to awake. I recommend all
broken-hearted lovers and dyspeptic dandies
to carry their complaints to the Mammoth
Cave, where they will undoubtedly find themselves
“translated” into very buxom and
happy persons, before they are aware of it.

In the Grand Gallery, opposite the entrance
of the Haunted Chambers, are, as was
previously mentioned, the ruins of the old
nitre-works—leaching-vats, pump frames, and
lines of wooden pipes. Of the last there are
two different ranges, one of which was formerly
used for bringing fresh water from the
dripping-spring to the vats; the other for forcing
it, when saturated with the salt, back to
the furnaces at the mouth of the cave. These
pipes, now mouldering with dry-rot, serve at
present no other purpose than to amuse visiters;
they are acoustical telegraphs, through
which the adventurer who has penetrated so
far, can transmit to his more timid friend at
the entrance an assurance that he is yet in
safety. A whisper bears the intelligence:
even a sigh, breathed into the tube, falls as
distinctly on the ear half a mile off as if the

friend who breathed it were reclining at the
listener's elbow.

At this place, the roof of the Grand Gallery,
perhaps thirty or thirty-five feet high,
suddenly rises to about the height of fifty,
which it however preserves for a distance of
only fifty or sixty feet, when it again sinks to
its former level. The break thus made in
the ceiling, forms a part of the continuous
lines of the Haunted Chambers, which may
be considered as an independent cave, running
at right angles with the Mammoth, and
above it; although, dipping downward, as it
crosses from right to left, it has broken
through into the latter. It can be entered
only on the right hand, where it opens in the
wall, fifteen or more feet from the floor; a
wide and lofty passage, cumbered with rocks,
the chief of which is the Tower Rock,—a
massive block, that looks, when viewed from
below, the guide perched, flambeau in hand,
on the top, like some old Saxon strong-hold
not yet in ruins. You see this cave continued
also on the left hand, where is a gap
in the wall still wider and higher, but choked
up by an immense mound of coarse sand
and gravel, impacted and hardened by time,
which has entirely obliterated the passage.

Curiosity has not yet attempted to dig a
path through this barrier, heaped up by some
mighty flood of old days; though a few hours'
labor might perhaps disclose a new batch of
wonders and mysteries. Clambering up the
huge sand-heap, till you reach what from
below seemed the ceiling, you perceive on
one hand a broad cornice-work like that seen
in the Vestibule, which runs from the choked-up
passage clear across the Grand Gallery,
until it is lost in the entrance of the Haunted
Chambers opposite. Surveying this cornice-work
more closely, you find that it consists
of a broad horizontal plate of rock, forming
a gallery, or bridge, by which you may walk
across the Grand Gallery, immediately under
its roof, into the Haunted Chambers, landing
on the top of the Tower Rock. But it
is an Al-Sirat,—a bridge for disembodied
spirits, rather than mortals of flesh and bone,
to traverse. It has an ugly inclination or
dip downwards, and looks as if expressly
contrived for dropping ambitious personages
into the horrible profound below. Shall we
enter the Haunted Chambers by this highway
of the dauntless—the Bridge Gallery, so narrow,
so treacherous, so dizzy? Not if we
were as solidipous as an elephant; not if we
had air-pumps to our feet, like lizards and
house-flies. The broad ladder laid against
the wall, rickety and somewhat rungless
though it be, and leading humbly, a lubberway,
to the foot of the Tower, is more to
our own taste. It is but six or seven well-stretched
steps from rung to rung, and we
are in the Haunted Chambers, whose name
itself fills us with expectant awe.

Our guide leaves us to admire alone the
gulf-like abyss of the Grand Gallery, now
under our feet; he has stolen away in advance,
and his steps are no longer heard clattering
along the rocky path. But hark! what
sound is that, like the deep bell of a cathedral,
or the gong of a theatre, booming in the
distance, peal after peal, clang after clang,
so solemn, so wild, so strange? A walk,
with a few stumbles and tumbles—we have
not yet our cave-legs (there are cave-legs as
well as sea-legs)—reveals the mystery; and
we discover our conductor standing under a
pendent stalactite, thumping it with great enthusiasm
and a big stone, and filling the sursounding
vaults with the clangour of his flinty
drum. This is one of the many bells (so
called) which the Mammoth Cave, in common
with most other caves, possesses.

We have reached, then, the abode of stalactites?
Ay, here they are, pillars old and dry
(for the oozing springs that formed them
have long since vanished), venerable and
majestic columns, once perhaps white and
ghastly, like so many giants in winding-sheets,
but now black, withered, and mummy-like,
begrimed with smoke, that has been fastening
around them for many generations. Here
we see them in groves, looking like the trunks
of an old forest at midnight, the rough concretions
on the low roof seeming not unlike
the umbrage of thick-matted boughs; there
they appear singly, or in cosy family groups
—Noibe and her children, Dian and her
nymphs, or any such mythologic party—that
Nature, like an idle sculptor, began, a thousand
years ago, to hew out of stone, without,
however, hewing enough to enable us to guess
what might have been her real intentions.

The name of the Haunted Chambers, however
poetical it may be, is incorrect, inasmuch
as it conveys the idea of a series of
different chambers; whereas this branch of
the cave consists of but a single passage,
fifty or sixty feet wide and half a mile long,
leading to a lower branch, which is of equal
extent, though of inferior width. The whole

length of the Haunted Chambers is, therefore,
one mile. The upper branch is chiefly remarkable
on account of its stalactites; at the
foot of one of which—the Arm-chair, as it is
called, from having a very royal seat hollowed
in its side—is a little basin or pool of
stone, that once received a drip of water
strongly charged with sulphur, from the roof
above. It is now dry, the spring having
gradually sealed up the crack through which
it formerly flowed. Another remarkable feature
of this branch is seen in its ceiling, which,
except in the immediate neighbourhood of the
stalactitic formations, where it is studded over
with concretions of all imaginable shapes,
is surprisingly flat and smooth, and in some
places white, looking as if it had been actually
finished off by the plasterer. This is
particularly observable in a place called the
Register Room, where, the roof being low
enough for the purpose, visiters frequently
trace their names with the smoke of a candle;
and many hundreds of such records of vanity
are already to be seen deforming the ceiling.
Its smoothness is owing to an incrustation or
deposit of calcareous matter on the surface of
the rock; though how it could ever be deposited
so regularly may well be wondered.

Within two hundred yards of the termination
of this Upper Branch of the Haunted
Chambers, the visiter finds himself suddenly
plunging down a steep of loose red sand,
poetically entitled the Lover's Leap, into a
hollow; at the bottom of which, in the left
hand wall, is a very narrow but lofty fissure,
the Devil's Elbow, winding through the wall
and leading into the Lower Branch; where,
under the roots of the stalactites that pillar
the branch above, he may spend an hour
or two among domes, pits, and sounding
springs that come spouting or showering down
from the roof, with the name, if not the grandeur
and beauty, of waterfalls. The great
Dome—or Bonaparte's Grand Dome, as the
guides delight to call it—is a lofty excavation,
in figure of a truncated cone, in the solid
roof, from which a prodigious mass of rocks
must have fallen to make it. These rocks
are, however, no where to be seen; the floor
is flat and solid below. They must have been
swept away by some raging flood; or, it may
be, that there was formerly, below the dome,
a pit, into which they fell, the pit being thus
filled up, and its entrance gradually obliterated
by incrustation.

The Haunted Chambers are said to owe

their name to an adventure that befell one of
the miners in former days, which is thus related.—In
the Lower Branch is a room called
the Salts Room, which produces considerable
quantities of the Sulphate of Magnesia, or of
Soda, we forget which—a mineral that the
proprietor of the cave did not fail to turn to
account. The miner in question was a new
and raw hand—of course neither very well acquainted
with the cave itself, nor with the approved
modes of averting or repairing accidents,
to which, from the nature of their occupation,
the miners were greatly exposed.
Having been sent, one day, in charge of an
older workman, to the Salts Room to dig a
few sacks of the salt, and finding that the path
to this sequestered nook was pefectly plain,
and that, from the Haunted Chambers being
a single, continuous passage, without branches,
it was impossible to wander from it, our hero
disdained, on his second visit, to seek or accept
assistance, and trudged off to his work alone.
The circumstance being common enough, he
was speedily forgotten by his brother miners;
and it was not until several hours after, when
they all left off their toil for the more agreeable
duty of eating their dinner, that his absence
was remarked, and his heroical resolution
to make his way alone to the Salts Room
remembered. As it was apparent, from the
time he had been gone, that some accident
must have happened him, half a dozen men, the
most of them negroes, stripped half naked,
their usual working costume, were sent to
hunt him up, a task supposed to be of no great
difficulty, unless he had fallen into a pit. In
the meanwhile, the poor miner, it seems, had
succeeded in reaching the Salts Room, filling
his sack, and retracing his steps half way
back to the Grand Gallery; when, finding the
distance greater than he thought it ought to
be, the conceit entered his unlucky brain that
he might perhaps be going wrong. No sooner
had the suspicion struck him, than he fell into
a violent terror, dropped his sack, ran backwards,
then returned, then ran back again,
each time more frightened and bewildered than
before; until at last he ended his adventures by
tumbling over a stone and extinguishing his
lamp. Thus left in the dark, not knowing where
to turn, frightened out of his wits besides, he
fell to remembering his sins—always remembered
by those who are lost in the Mammoth
Cave—and praying with all his might for
succour. But hours passed away, and assistance
came not: the poor fellow's frenzy increased;
he felt himself a doomed man, he
thought his terrible situation was a judgment
imposed on him for his wickedness; nay, he
even believed, at last, that he was no longer
an inhabitant of the earth—that he had been
translated, even in the body, to the place of
torment—in other words, that he was in hell
itself, the prey of the devils, who would presently
be let loose upon him. It was at this
moment the miners in search of him made
their appearance: they lighted upon his sack,
lying where he had thrown it, and set up a
great shout, which was the first intimation he
had of their approach. He started up, and
seeing them in the distance, the half-naked
negroes in advance, all swinging their torches
aloft, he, not doubting they were those identical
devils whose appearance he had been
expecting, took to his heels, yelling lustily for
mercy; nor did he stop, notwithstanding the
calls of his amazed friends, until he had fallen
a second time among the rocks, where he
lay on his face, roaring for pity, until, by dint
of much pulling and shaking, he was convinced
that he was still in the world and the
Mammoth Cave. Such is the story they tell
of the Haunted Chambers, the name having
been given to commemorate the incident.

This Salts Room contains a pit, if we can
so call a huge domed chamber below, communicating
with it by means of a narrow
crack in the floor. The floor is here very
thin, in fact, a mere scale of rock, but, fortunately,
rock of the most adamantine character.
By lowering down torches, and peeping
through the crack, one dimly discerns the
chamber below. Its floor is at a depth of
fifty feet, and is composed of firm and dry
sand or clay. It seems like the vestibule of
a new set of chambers, which no one has yet
explored. An attempt was made by our little
party to examine it, by lowering the lightest
individual of the company into the pit with
ropes—an enterprise that was baffled, and
had nearly produced a fatal termination,
in consequence of the rope's parting, or beginning
to part, at the moment when our adventurous
explorer was hanging midway
down the pit. With a good rope, however,
nothing would be more easy than to reach the
bottom in safety.

7. CHAPTER VII.

But let us resume our explorations in the
Grand Gallery.

Three hundred yards beyond the mouth of
the Haunted Chambers, proceeding along this
wide, lofty, ever frowning, and ever majestic
highway, on the brow of a hill, you perceive,
on the left hand, a broad chasm, reaching to
the ceiling, its floor heaped with huge rocks,
This is the Ruined, or Rocky Cave, extending
a distance of a hundred and fifty yards, wide
and high throughout, but its floor covered
with blocks of stone of the most gigantic
size, some exceeding twenty feet in cubic dimensions,
and weighing six hundred tons. In

this cave, spread out upon the path, you find
a relic of the ancient inhabitants of the place.
It is an Indian mat of bark, a cloak perhaps
—or a part of one, for it is only a fragment
about a yard square. It may have covered,
in its day, the shoulders of a warrior of renown,
or of a maiden, the pride and beauty
of her clan; in which thought we will but
look upon it, and pass it reverently by.

A hundred yards further on, the Grand
Gallery makes a majestic sweep to the right.
Just where the curve begins, you see, lying
against the right hand wall, a huge oblong
rock, pointed at its further extremity like the
prow of a ship. The Adam that gave names
to the lions of the cave has christened this
rock the Steamboat; and, it must be confessed,
that it looks very much like a steamboat,
only that wheels, and wheel-houses are entirely
wanting; not to speak of smoke-stacks
and the superstructure of cabins, pilot-boxes,
and so on. It was some considerable period
—years, in fact—after this Steamboat was
observed reposing in her river of stone, before
any curious person thought of peeping round
her bows, to see what might be concealed
behind them. The peep revealed an unanticipated
mystery. A narrow, but quite easy

passage was discovered, leading into a circular
room a hundred feet in diameter, with
a low roof, and broken floor, hollowed like a
bowl, covered with sand and gravel, in which
floor were two different holes or pits, leading
to unknown chambers below. This room is
the Vestibule of the Deserted Chambers, but
more frequently called, in allusion to its figure,
the Wooden Bowl. The holes, which are so
small as only to admit one person to creep
down them at a time, are called the Dog and
Snake Holes, and are, in many respects, worthy
of their names. By descending either of
them to a depth of twenty or thirty feet, we
find ourselves at once in the Deserted Chambers—to
many the most impressive and terrific
portion of the cave. Here the visiter, if
he has not felt bewildered before, finds himself
at last in a labyrinth, from which no sagacity
or courage of his own could remove
him—a chaos of winding branches, once the
beds of subterraneous torrents; and he almost
dreads, at each step, to see the banished
floods come roaring upon him from some
midnight chamber. Now he beholds great
rocks—mighty flakes scaling from the roof—
hanging over him,—in one place so low that
he must stoop to pass under them,—yet suspended
to the roof only by an edge or a corner.
What was the sword of Damocles to
these treacherous traps, that would, any one of
them, provided it should fall, smash a rhinoceros
with as much ease as a basket of eggs?
The ram of a pile-engine were a falling feather
in comparison. Now he startles aghast,
as hollow echoes under his feet bespeak the
dismal abyss from which he is separated only
by a thin shell of floor. Now he stands
trembling on the brink of a horrible chasm,
down which the rock he has toppled goes
crashing and rumbling to an immeasurable
depth; or now listens, with little less of awe,
at the verge of another, in which, far down,
he can hear the obscure dashings of a waterfall.
Now he sits upon a crag—perhaps
alone—for if he would, for once in his life,
feel what solitude is, (a thing man knows
nothing of, even in desert islands or the
solitary cells of a prison,) here is the place
to try the experiment—with nameless passages
yawning all around him, in a wilderness
and desert such as his imagination never before
dreamed of, reading such a lesson of his
impotence and insignificance as not even the
stars or the billows of the ocean can teach
him. In short, the Deserted Chambers are
terrific, chaotic, and not to be conceived of
by those who have not seen them; for which
reason I will not attempt the task of description.
It may be observed, however, that
they consist of three principal branches, one
of which is nearly a mile long, another the
third of a mile, the remaining one only three
or four hundred yards; and that all three are
full of pits, domes, and springs without number.
The shortest branch contains three or
four fearful pits. Over one of these, called
the Side-saddle Pit, projects a rock, affording
a very comfortable seat to any visiter who
chooses to peep into the den of darkness beneath,
or the dome arching above it. Another,
a well of fourteen or fifteen feet diameter, is
covered by a thin plate of rock, lying on it
like the cover of a pot, though a cover somewhat
too small for the vessel, and seemingly
supported only at one point. This is both a
very curious and a very dangerous pit.

But the chief glory of this branch is the
Bottomless Pit, so called, par excellence, and
suspected by many to run pretty nearly
through the whole diameter of the earth.
The branch terminates in it, and the explorer
suddenly finds himself brought up on its brink,
standing upon a projecting platform, surrounded

on three sides by darkness and terror,
a gulf on the right hand, a gulf on the
left, and before him what seems an interminable
void. He looks aloft; but no eye has
yet reached the top of the great overarching
dome; nothing is there seen but the flashing
of water dropping from above, and smiling,
as it shoots by, in the unwonted gleam of
the lamps. He looks below, and nothing
there meets his glance, save darkness as
thick as lamp-black; but he hears a wild,
mournful melody of waters, the wailing of
the brook for the green and sunny channel
left in the upper world, never more to be revisited.
Truly, as we sit upon the brink listening,
the complaining of those plaintive
drops doth breath a sad and woful melancholy
into our inmost spirits, a nostalgic
longing for the bright and beautiful world we
have left behind us. Who could believe, in
this dismal cave, that earth was otherwise
than a paradise? that rogues and rascals
made up a part of its population? No, our
remembrance, here, is only of the good and
pure, the just and gentle, the noble and the
beautiful; those for whose society we may
yearn with a pleasant sorrow, with tears as
bright and pure as these falling drops, with
sighs and murmurings as sweetly sad as these
of the caverned fountain.

But sweetly sad they sound no more.
Down goes a rock, tumbled over the cliff by
the guide, who is of opinion that folks come
hither to see and hear, not to muse and be
melancholy. There it goes—crash; it has
reached the bottom. No—hark! it strikes
again; once more and again, still falling, still
striking. Will it never stop? One's hair
begins to bristle, as he hears the sound repeated,
growing less and less, until the ear
can follow it no longer. Certainly, if the Pit
of Fredericshall be eleven thousand feet deep,
the Bottomless Pit of the Mammoth Cave
must be its equal: for two minutes, at least,
we can hear the stone descending.

But there is, it appears to me, something
deceptive in this mode of estimating the
depth of a pit. Mr. Lee sounded the pit in
question with a line; and, bottomless though
it be, found bottom at a depth of one hundred
and seventy-three feet; though he supposed,
as every one else who hurls stones into it,
will suppose, that his plummet had struck a
shelf, the bottom of the pit being in reality a
great many fathoms beneath. Nothing would
be easier than to ascertain, by throwing stones

into it, the depth of a pit of perpendicular
descent, and having smooth continuous walls.
But it must be remembered that all such
cavities are very broken and ragged, with
numberless shelves and other projections, on
which have lodged stones and rubbish from
the mouldering walls above. A stone being
cast into such a pit, if it be very deep, will
naturally strike upon some shelf, from which
it dislodges much of the rubbish, that falls
with it to the bottom, each fragment making a
louder or fainter noise, according to its weight;
and of these particles the smallest ones,
which are those that make the least noise,
will be the longest in rolling off their perch;
though, of course, once off it, they will fall
as rapidly as the others. Allowing that the
bottom of the pit were but a few yards below
the shelf, it will be easy to perceive that the
sound of these dislodged particles, falling
after the stone to the bottom, the heaviest
first and the lightest last, would produce all
the phenomena caused by a single stone
dropping from ledge to ledge for a long time,
and consequently through a great depth.
There is, and, indeed, can be, no certainty
except in the line and plummet.

A few hundred feet back from this Bottomless

Pit, is a narrow chasm, called the
Covered Way, which, on being followed, is
found to terminate in the side of the pit, fifty
feet below the platform; which is perhaps as
great a depth into the pit as any visiter will
ever choose to venture.

8. CHAPTER VIII.

Returning again to the Grand Gallery,
and pursuing the majestic curve it makes at
the place of the Steamboat, we find it presently
taking another and more abrupt sweep
to the left, still wide, lofty, and impressive.
In the angle here made, we see the opening
into another cave,—the Sick Room,—which,
running back, and under the Haunted Chambers,
terminates at last under the Grand
Gallery near the Church, where was originally
another outlet, now covered over with
rubbish.

The visiter has now before him a walk of a

thousand yards; which having accomplished,
he will perhaps lay aside his enthusiasm for
a moment, to wonder how he is ever to get
back again. Throughout the whole of this
distance, the floor of the cave is strown over
with loose rocks,—flakes from the ceiling
and crags from the wall,—of all imaginable
sizes and shapes, over which the labour of
trudging, at least at the pace the guide holds
most agreeable, is inconceivably great; while
a certain natural anxiety to avoid tumbling
into the numberless gaps betwixt the huge
rough blocks, and to step upon the slabs,
which eternally see-saw under your feet, precisely
at the point that will enable you to
preserve your equilibrium, adds greatly to
your distresses; while, at the same time, it prevents
your taking any note of the grandeur
around, except when the guide occasionally
pauses to point out some remarkable object,
—the Keel-boat, (a tremendous rock sixty or
seventy feet long, fifteen wide, and depth unknown.)—the
Devil's Looking-Glass, (which
is a hugh plate of stone standing erect,)—the
Snow Room, (where even a lusty halloo
brings down from the ceiling a shower of
saline flakes, as white and beautiful almost
as those of snow itself,)—and other such
curiosities. In another visit, he will perhaps
show you what you did not before suspect, that
you have passed many different openings in
the left wall, running into caves called the Side
Cuts, in consequence of all of them winding
back again into the Grand Gallery. In one
of them is a perforation,—the Black Hole,—
leading into the Deserted Chambers, forming
the third entrance to those wild and dreary
vaults. Throughout the whole of this space
of a thousand yards, the Grand Gallery is
worthy of its name, being uniformly of the
grandest dimensions and aspect. In two
places, the rocks covering the floor are of
such vast size, and lie heaped in such singular
confusion, that fancy has traced in them
a resemblance to the ruins of demolished
cities, Troglodytic Luxors, and Palmyras;
and they bear the names of the First and
Second Cities.

But we have accomplished the thousand
yards, the guide pauses to give us rest; we
have reached a new region, we look upon a
new spectacle; we are in the Cross Rooms,
(so called,) at the entrance of the Black
Chambers. A wilder, sublimer scene imagination
could scarcely paint; even Martin
might here take a lesson in the grand and

terrible. The Grand Gallery, previously contracted,
in a short bend, to a width of thirty
or forty feet, suddenly expands to the width
of more than a hundred, which it preserves
throughout a length of five hundred feet. Midway
of this noble hall, on the left hand, running
at right angles with it, is seen another
apartment, a hundred and fifty feet wide, and,
measuring from its opening, more than two
hundred long; or, if we add to it the width of
the Grand Gallery, three hundred feet long;
the two rooms thus uniting into one in the
shape of the letter T. The whole of this prodigious
area is strown with rocks of enormous
size, tumbled together in a manner that cannot
be described, and looking, especially in
the transeptal portion, where confusion is by
them worse confounded, like the ruins of some
old castle of the Demi-gods, too ponderous
to stand, yet too massive to decay. This
apartment is bounded, or rather divided, at
what seems its end, by ragged cliffs forming
a kind of very large island, into two branches,
through both of which, clambering aloft
among the rugged blocks and up two crannies,
called the Chimneys, very irregular and
bewildering, you can penetrate into the Black
Chambers above. The whole extent of these
chambers, which are black and dismal, as
their name denotes, does not exceed six or
seven hundred yards; and there is nothing
in them, though they contain several domes
arched over mountains of fallen sandstone,
with a few stalactites and clusters of crystals
here and there, to compare in interest with
their entrance. The greatest curiosities, perhaps,
are four or five piles of stones looking
like rude altars, and so denominated, left
thus heaped up by the Autochthones of the
cave; though for what purpose it is difficult
to imagine.

The entrance into these Black Chambers
by the Chimneys, however narrow and contorted
they may be, is not very difficult; but
the exit is quite another matter. There are
as many chaotic rocks around the tops of the
Chimneys in the chambers above, as at the
bottom; and it is sometimes no easy task to
find them; the more particularly as there are
dozens of other holes exactly like them,
though leading to nothing. Even the guides
themselves are sometimes for a moment at
fault. Some years since two young gentlemen
of the West were conducted into the
Black Chambers, whence, in due course of
time, they proposed to return to the Grand

Gallery; a feat, however, as they soon discovered
to their horror, which it was much
easier to propose than perform. The guide,
who happened not to be very familiar with
this branch of the cave, looked and looked
in vain, for the Chimneys. Not one could he
find. He began to think that while he had
been with the party at the extreme verge of
the Chambers, the rocks must have fallen
down, and sealed up the two passages. Here
was a situation; and, soon there was a scene.
The young gentlemen became frantic; and,
declaring they would sooner die on the spot
than endure their horrible imprisonment longer,
condemned to agonize out existence by
inches, they drew their pistols—with which,
like true American travellers, they were both
well provided—resolving at once to end the
catastrophe. The only difficulty was a question
that occurred, whether each should do
execution upon himself by blowing his own
brains out, or whether, devoted to friendship
even in death, each should do that office for
the other. Fortunately, before the difficulty
was settled, the guide stumbled upon one of
the Chimneys, and blood and gunpowder were
both saved.

The danger of being entrapped in these

dens is perhaps as great as ever; but such an
accident can only happen where the guide,
besides being inexperienced, is of a temper to
take alarm, or become confused at an unexpected
difficulty. In all intricate passages
throughout the cave, and in many that are
not intricate, the rocks are marked with broad
arrows pointing the way out. A piece of
chalk—or, to be correct, of decomposing limestone—caught
up along the way, makes an intelligible
record on the black rocks of the path;
and explo ers at first, and after them super-philanthropic
visiters, have taken care these
marks shall be in abundance. The rocks at
the Chimneys have their share of arrows, and
a man with good eyes and a philosophic temperament
will find little difficulty in making
his way in and out.

In the right-hand wall of the Grand Gallery,
directly opposite the Black Chambers, is
the opening of another vault, (whence the
name of Cross Rooms,) called Fox's Hall. It
runs backward, and after a course of four or
five hundred feet, returns to the Grand Gallery.

From the Black Chambers to what may be
properly considered the termination of the
Grand Gallery, is a distance of only two or

three hundred yards. During a part of this
space, the path is very narrow, running between
rudely piled, but high walls of loose
stones, thrown up by the ancient inhabitants,
for a purpose they doubtless understood themselves,
though it will not seem very obvious
to the modern visiter. The passage, however,
soon widens again; and presently we hear
the far-off murmur of a waterfall, whose wild
pattering sound, like that of a heavy rain, but
modified almost to music by theringing echoes
of the cave, grows louder as we approach,
and guides us to the end of the Grand Gallery.
We find ourselves on the verge of a
steep stony descent, a hollow running across
the cave from right to left, bounded on the
further side by a solid wall extending from
the bottom of the descent up to the roof, in
which it is lost. In the roof, at the right hand
corner are several perforations as big as hogs-heads,
from which water is ever falling—on
ordinary occasions, in no great quantities, but
after heavy rains, in torrents, and with a horrible
roar that shakes the walls, and resounds
afar through the cave. It is at such times
that these cascades are worthy the name of
Cataracts, which they bear. The water falling
into the hollow below, immediately vanishes
among the rocks. In fact, this hollow is
the mouth of a great pit, loosely filled in with
stones, which have not even the merit of being
lodged securely. A huge mass of rocks fell,
some years ago, from the little domes of the
cataracts, almost filling that corner of the
hollow; but they speedily crushed their way
down to the original level. On another occasion,
some visiters tumbling a big rock into
the hollow on the left hand, the crash set all
below in commotion, causing a considerable
sinking in that quarter.

Over this portion of the hollow—that is,
on the left hand—high up in the wall that
bounds the passage, the visiter dimly discerns
an opening, behind which, listening attentively,
he can hear the pattering of another
cascade. Descending into the hollow and
clambering up a mound of stones by way of
ladder, we make our way into this opening
—the Garret-hole—and find ourselves between
two hollows—the one we have just
crossed, and a second—forming part of a concealed
chamber of no great extent—into
which, from a barrel-like dome above, falls
the Second Cataract. Opposite to this Second
Cataract, at the bottom of the wall, (which is,
however, some twelve or fifteen feet above

the bottom of the hollow,) is a horizontal fissure,
ten or fifteen feet wide, but so low as
only to permit a man lying flat on his face to
enter it. But through that narrow fissure—
the Humble Chute—and in that grovelling position,
we must pass, if we would visit the
Solitary Cave; a branch only discovered within
a few years. Indeed, if we can believe the
guide, our little party was the first that ever
entered it; for though the fissure had been
often observed, and it was thought might lead
to a new branch, neither himself nor any
other individual had ever attempted to crawl
through it. It is, in truth, somewhat of a awe-inspiring
appearance, looking like one of
Milton's
though we discovered, to our great satisfaction,
that it led to quite another place.

Crawling along on our faces for a hundred
feet or more, we found ourselves at last in
more comfortable quarters, in a cave neither
very wide nor high, nor indeed extensive; the
greatest length of the main passage not exceeding
seven hundred yards, but curious for
the dens and grotesque figures worn in the

rocks by water, and for its recent stalactites,
of which there is quite a grove in the chamber
called the Fairy Grotto. The Island—
or Boone's Castle, as it is more poetically
called—is a very curious rock supporting the
roof in manner of a pier, but excavated
through and through in several directions, so
as to make a little room, in which you may
sit at ease, looking out into the cave by sundry
wide, window-like orifices in its walls.
From the main passage run several narrower
branches, some of which have not yet been
explored. In one of them was found a kind
of nest composed of sticks, moss, and leaves,
with, I believe, a walnut or two in it—supposed
to be a rat's nest, floated thither from
some unknown higher branch; and in another
passage was found a tooth resembling a
beaver's. In one of the passages, called the
Coral-grove Branch, is a deep pit, suspected,
upon pretty strong grounds, to have some
underhand kind of communication with the
Cataracts, which are at no great distance;
and, indeed, from an occurrence that happened
some few months after the discovery of
the Solitary Cave, this communication can
hardly be questioned. One of the younger
guides, at the time mentioned, had conducted
a visiter into the Solitary Cave, where they
employed themselves looking for new branches
at its extremity. It was a winter's day,
very stormy; and rain was falling, when they
entered the cave. The Cataracts were found
pouring down water rather more freely than
usual, but not in quantities to excite any
alarm; and they crawled through the Humble
Chute, and to the farthest recesses of the
branch, without giving them a thought. In
these remote vaults, as indeed in all others
throughout the cave, except in the immediate
vicinity of falling water, a death-like silence
perpetually reigns: of course, a sound of
any kind occurring, immediately attracts attention,
if it does not cause dismay. I can
well remember the thrilling effect produced
upon myself and companions, when first exploring
the Solitary Cave, by a low, hollow,
but very distant sound we heard once or
twice repeated, which we supposed was
caused by the falling of rocks in chambers
far beneath—a phenomenon, however, as it
seems, of very rare occurrence. The visiter
and his guide, of whom I speak, were startled
from their tranquillity by a more formidable
noise—a sudden rumbling and roaring, distant
indeed, but loud enough to produce consternation.
They retraced their steps as
rapidly as they could. The noise increased
as they advanced; and by and by, when they
reached the mouth of the Coral-grove Branch,
which is two hundred yards from the Humble
Chute, they found it full of water, and pouring
out a flood into the Solitary Cave, here,
at its lowest level. They hurried by, astounded
and affrighted, yet rejoiced to find the
water was not rushing into the cave through
the Humble Chute, which would have effectually
cut off their escape. It was no longer
to be doubted that a torrent, a result of the
rains, was now pouring down the Cataracts,
especially the second one, immediately opposite
the outlet of the Humble Chute; its terrific
din made that more than evident; and it
was questioned whether the body of falling
water might not fill the narrow passage into
which the Solitary Cave opens, and so prevent
their further retreat. But the occasion
was pressing; time was too precious to be
wasted in hesitation. The guide crept up
the Chute, and reached its outlet, where he
was saluted by a flood of spray that immediately
extinguished his torch. He perceived,
however, that the path was still open to the
Garret Hole, which if he could reach, there
was little fear of himself and companion dying
the death of drowned rats. His torch
proving insufficient to resist the spray and
eddies of air caused by the cascade, he crept
a little back into the Chute, where he manfully
substituted his shirt for the torch; and
with that flaming in his hands, making a gallant
rush, he succeeded in reaching the Garret
Hole; whence, lighting his torch again, it
was afterwards not very difficult to assist in
extricating his companion. The Solitary
Cave was visited again, a few days after: the
floods had then entirely subsided, and the
Cataracts dwindled to their former insignificance,
leaving no vestige of the late scene of
disorder and terror.

9. CHAPTER IX.

Standing again upon the verge of the declivity
of the First Cataract, facing toward
the mouth of the cave, we perceive on the
right hand, a wide and lofty passage running
from the Grand Gallery, which we did not
before notice. This is commonly considered
as a continuation of the Grand Gallery, or
Main Cave, and may be followed for a distance
of fifteen hundred yards—nearly a
mile. Half a mile from its entrance at the
Cataracts, it is crossed by another wide cave,
the right and left hand branches of which are
each half a mile long, and called, respectively,
Symmes's Pit Branch and the Branch of the
Blue Spring. Each has its curiosities and its

interest. The end of the former is the farthest
point from daylight yet reached in
the Mammoth Cave, being but a few yards
short of two miles and a half. The pit from
which it takes its name is of unknown depth,
and peculiarly dangerous to approach; its
funnel-shaped mouth being strown with
loose rocks, that, at a touch of the foot, roll
into the chasm: it is such a trap as the lion-spider
digs in the sand for his unwary prey,
which a single false step slides headlong into
his expanded jaws.

Into these branches it is not my intention
to drag the reader: it is sufficient if he will
follow me six or seven hundred yards into the
Main Cave. Throughout this distance, the
floor is still rugged; the path runs over fallen
slabs, that rock and clatter under our feet
with incessant din—in some places to such a
degree as to have gained for certain long but
not lofty mounds over which we must pass,
the name of the Clattering Hills.

But to what a chamber this wearisome and
painful road conducts us! We have expended
our breath, our epithets, our enthusiasm,
upon the smaller glories of the Vestibule and
the Hall of the Black Chambers, and we
have nothing left wherewith to paint the vast

vault into which we have now found our way.
Yet with even a wilderness of fine words at
command, I doubt whether I could convey an
adequate idea of the scene, or of the impressions
it produces on a spectator's mind. If
the reader will fancy an oval room extremely
regular in figure of the enormous dimensions
of one hundred and fifty yards in length, by
eighty yards wide, (feet are here too trifling
for our purpose,) crowned by a dome one
hundred and twenty feet high, and of an oval
shape, corresponding throughout with the
figure of the room, he will have a better idea
of the den and its horrible grandeur, than
could be conveyed by the most laboured description.
On the floor, which is actually
two acres in area, lies a mountain of great
rocks—fallen from the dome, and reposing
chiefly against the left wall. From this mountain—a
pile of ruins such as we have seen
in the Grand Gallery—the chamber derives
its name of the Chief City—a name that I
infinitely prefer to the trivial one of the Temple,
under which it figures in Mr. Lee's map.
The great dome above is of a peculiar and
striking appearance, being formed by the
giving away, one after the other, of the great
horizontal strata of rock, the perforation of
each in the ascending series being less in
dimensions than that in the stratum immediately
below, until the top of all, in place of a
lantern, is closed by a flat oval slab symmetrically
cut and placed with the figure and axis
of the chamber. This noble dome, as Mr.
Lee justly observes, “in passing through,
from one end to the other, appears to follow,
like the sky, in passing from place to place
on the earth.” From its height, it could not
be otherwise.

It must not be supposed that all the vast
dimensions of this prodigious chamber can
be embraced by the eye at once. The darkness
of the rock of which all is composed,
not to speak of the boundless extent of the
chamber, forbids that. It is only by ascending
the mountain, collecting the pieces of
cane—remnants of old Indian torches—and
building fires with them, that we can see any
thing, except a few yards of rocky floor
around us;—all else is the void of darkness.
When the fires are in flame, the torches all
freshly trimmed, we can, from the top of the
mountain, discern, dimly it must be confessed,
the dome above us and the opposite wall;
but the ends of the chamber are still veiled
in midnight. It is only when a guide and a

companion are placed one at each end, with
their torches, that the whole immensity of the
scene begins to break upon our minds.

Upon this mountain we will end our journey.
It is a favourite place with visiters,
and was a favourite with the Indian inhabitants
of yore. The interstices of the rocks,
from top to bottom, are full of the half-burnt
remnants of their cane torches: you may, in
any place, collect, in five minutes, fragments
enough to build a fire. Hundreds—I might
almost say, thousands—of fires have been already
built by visiters; but the supply of fuel
seems yet inexhaustible. The presence of
these canes—the growth of the river-banks
near—in such astonishing, such unaccountable
quantities, is all that remains to prove in
what favour the Red-man held the ruins of
the Chief City. Visiters of the pale-faced
race have left still more surprising proofs of
their regard. The chinks of the wall, at the
top of the mountain, are stuck full of written
papers, in which sundry full-hearted personages
have acquainted the Mammoth Cave
with the state of their affections. Here a
confiding, and, I doubt not, youthful personage,
who signs his name in full—it may be
Charles Henry Tender, or Allheart, or any

thing else—assures Miss Lavinia Small,—
Peabody,—or Pettibones, that he visited the
Mammoth Cave at such a date, and that he
adores her, and will continue to do so as long
as the rocks hold together; there another son
of soul, who writes a good hand, somewhat
the worse for bad paper and mouldered ink,
and spells nothing aright except his own
name, proclaims that he was educated at
such a college, declaring that he will hold his
Alma Mater in honour and affection, and
also Miss Angelina B—, diffidently leaving
her name to be guessed at; then comes another
edition of Mr. Tender and Miss Small,
under other names, and then another, and
another without end—memorials of fond
hearts and foolish heads.

From these frank confessions, whispered
in pen and ink into the rocky ears of the
Mammoth Cave, and the representations of
the guides, there seems to be every reason
to believe that the Mammoth Cave—and
particularly the Chief City thereof—has a
wonderful effect in awakening the tender
passions; a phenomenon which, however interesting
it might be to discuss, I must leave
to be solved by the philosophers. I felt
somewhat of an inclination, at the first peep

into them, to pocket a brace or two of these
precious records; but they were secrets
breathed in the confessional—offerings made
to the benign (so we must conceive him)
genius of the cave; and I returned them to
their places, to rot and moulder, as perhaps
have already done some of the idle hands
that traced them.

In the Deserted Chambers, we made an
effort, and a successful one, to find out what
solitude was. Let us, in this fearful vault,
upon this mound of rocks, two miles away
from the blessed light of heaven, prove what
is darkness;—a thing, I devoutly believe, quite
as little known in the outer world, even as
solitude. Let us blow out our torches. What
should we fear? We have our pockets full
of Lucifers, and `can again our former lights
restore,' whenever it repents us. What, indeed,
can we fear? Man is not with us: we
are alone with God. Is darkness so very
terrible?

Puff, puff, puff—it is done; the torches are
out, and now we are indeed in darkness. Ah!
that those who dream that Heaven, in visiting
them with a little affliction, a little desolation,
a little gloom—the darkest that was
ever infused into the sparkling dew-drop of
life—has quenched the light of hope and happiness,
leaving the spirit in midnight, should
sit with us upon this rock, and say if such
darkness as this ever lay even for a moment
upon the mind! Never: such darkness were
annihilation. It is awful. The atmosphere
is a rock, palpable and solid as the limestone
walls around; the very air seems petrified—
condensed into a stratum of coal, in which
we sit encased like toads or insects—fossils
—living fossils. Such it is to us—to man;
all whose skill exhausted in the most ingenious
devices, could not collect from it light
enough to see his own fingers. Yet the bat
flutters by at ease; and the rat, which has no
such fine organization as his airy cousin, or
as a somnambule from the digits of an Animal-Magnetizer—creatures,
as we all know—the
bat and the somnambule—that see through
their bodies, or, rather, see by instinct, without
the intervention of visual apparatus of
any kind—the rat scampers over the rocks
with equal facility and confidence; and, doubtless,
if a cat were here, she also would find
light enough to make a bold dash at his ratship.
But we are in gloom—gloom unparallelled
by any thing in the world. Truly,
indeed, man knows nothing about darkness
there—Alas! none but those to whose eyes
Heaven has denied the blessing of light altogether.
The blind see such darkness; and
here we can learn (for during a period we
can feel it) the depth and misery of the privation.

And now, while thus sitting in gloom ineffable,
a secret dread (notwithstanding the
actual assurance we possess of security) stealing
through our spirits, we can understand
and appreciate the horror of mind which inevitably
seizes upon men lost in caves, and
deprived of their lights; even when their
reason—if they could listen to that ever illused
counsellor, the victim and football of
every fitful passion—tells them that their
situation is not wholly desperate. Although
no fatal accident has ever happened in the
Mammoth Cave, men have been frequently
lost in it; or, at least, have lost their lights,
and so been left imprisoned in darkness. In
such a case, as proceeding in any direction
in the dark is quite out of the question, all
that is to be done is to sit patiently down,

waiting until relief comes from without; which
will happen as soon as the persons outside
have reason, from your unusual stay, to suspect
that some such catastrophe has occurred.
This every body who enters the cave knows
well enough, and none better than the guides;
and, one would suppose, such knowledge
would always, in case of accident, preserve
from unmanly terror. The case is, however,
as numerous examples prove, quite otherwise;
guide and visiter, the bold man and
the timid, yield alike to apprehension, give
over all as lost, and pass the period of
imprisonment in lamentations and prayers.
It is astonishing, indeed, how vastly devout
some men, who were never devout before,
become, when thus lost in the cave; though,
as might be suspected, the fit of devotion is
of no longer duration than the time of imprisonment:

applies very well to the history of cave conversions.
I had the good fortune, when on
my way to the Mammoth Cave some years
ago, in a certain city of the South-West,
to stumble upon a worthy gentleman, who,
among his many virtues public and private,
was not supposed to lay any particular claim to
religious devotion; or if he did, took no great
pains to make it evident: on the contrary, I
heard it very energetically averred by one
who was a proficient in the same accomplishment,
“that Captain B— could swear
harder than any other man on the Mississippi.”
The Captain ascertaining whither we
were directing our footsteps, congratulated
us upon the pleasures we had in store, and
concluded by informing us that he had visited
the Mammoth Cave himself, and, with his
guide, had been lost in it, remaining in this
condition and in the dark, for eight or nine
hours. “Dreadful!” my friend and self both
exclaimed: “what did you do?” “Do!” replied
the Captain, with the gravity of a philosopher;
“all that we could;—as soon as
our lights went out, we sat down upon a
rock, and waited until the people came in
and hunted us up.” We admired the Captain's
courage, and went on our way, until
we had arrived within two miles of the Mammoth
Cave; when a thunder-shower drove us
to seek shelter in a cabin on the way-side.
Here we found a man who had been born
and bred, and lived all his life, within so short
a distance of the cave, without having ever
entered it: in excuse of which unpardonable
deficiency, he told us, “he had a brother who
had been in it often enough,” had sometimes
officiated as guide, and had once even been
lost in it. “He was along with a gentleman
he was guiding—Captain B—: perhaps
you know Captain B—?” said our hospitable
host, “Captain B— of —. Well,
he was the gentleman with my brother: they
lost their lights, and were kept fast in the desperate
hole for nine hours—awfully frightened,
too.” “What! Captain B— frightened?”
“Just as much as my brother: I have heard
my brother tell the story over a hundred
times. They got to praying, both of 'em, as
loud as they could; and my brother says, the
Captain made some of the most beautiful
prayers he ever heard in his life! and he
reckons, if the Captain would take to it, he'd
make a rale tear-cat of a preacher!”—O philosophy!
how potent thou art in an arm-chair,
or at the dinner table!

But we have been long enough in darkness,
long enough even in the cave. We relight

our torches, we bid farewell to the Hall
of the Chief City, and returning to the Grand
Gallery, retrace the long path that leads us
back to daylight.

10. CHAPTER X.

CONCLUSION.

The Mammoth Cave possesses few features
of interest for a geologist or naturalist. It
may be considered a great crack opened in
the thick bed of limestone, by some convulsion,
or series of convulsions, which have left
it in some places in its original condition,
while, in other parts, it has been worn and
altered by rushing floods that have swept
into it sand, gravel, and clay; while, also, the
infiltration of springs from above has, here
and there, destroyed the calcareous crust,
and exposed the superstratum of sandstone.
The earthquakes, that have left their visible
devastations in every part of the cave, must,
however, have been a thousand times more
violent than those of modern days. Many

shocks—the concussions that succeeded the
great New Madrid earthquake of 1811—
were experienced by the nitre-diggers, while
at work in the cave; but, though sorely
frightened on each occasion, they never saw
a single rock shaken from the roof or walls.
The rock contains no fossils, or none that
we could discover; though shells abound in
the limestone in the vicinity. No fossil bones
have been discovered. Human bones in a
recent condition were dug up near the entrance;
but no mummies were found. The
mummy in one of the public museums said to
be from the Mammoth Cave, was taken, we
were told, from a cave in the neighbourhood
—we believe, the Pit Cave; though deposited
for awhile in the Mammoth Cave for exhibition.
There are vast numbers of rats in the
cave, though we never could get sight of any
of them. What they can find to live on may
well be wondered at. In winter, the roof of
the cave, as far in, at least, as the Black
Chambers, where we found them in numbers,
is seen dotted over with bats. In the low
and humid branches, there may frequently be
seen, galloping along over roof and floor, an
insect with long cricket-like legs, and body
like a spider; and a smaller insect, somewhat
like that “strange bedfellow,” with which
misery makes us acquainted, may be sometimes
discovered.

I have frequently had occasion to speak of
the Indians, the original inhabitants of the
cave; and, indeed, this is to me one of the
most interesting subjects connected with the
Mammoth Cave. I use the word inhabitants;
for mere visiters, unless the cave was, in its
day, much more of a lion among the savage
Red-men than it is now, even among their
white successors, could never have left behind
them so many vestiges. We have seen what
vast quantities of broken, half-burnt canes lie
among the rocks of the Chief City. They
are scattered in other parts of the cave—I
might say, throughout the whole extent of the
Grand Gallery—in nearly equal profusion.
These, there can be little doubt, are the remains
of torches—in some cases of fires; for
which former purpose they were tied together
with strips of young hickory bark, into little
faggots. Such faggots are still occasionally
picked up, half-consumed, the thongs still
around them. Besides, there have been discovered
stone arrow-heads, axes, and hammers,
and pieces of pottery, with moccasins,

blankets of woven bark, and other Indian
valuables; in short, evidence sufficient to
prove that these occidental Troglodytes actually
lived in the cave. No mere visiters
would have taken the trouble to build the
walls in the Grand Gallery near the Cataracts;
much less to clear away the rocks from
the floor of the Blue-Spring Branch, as we
find has been done, so as to make a good
path on the sand beneath. There are, in
several branches, places where the walls have
been picked and beaten with stone-hammers
—for what purpose no one can tell; in others,
rocks heaped up into mounds, and the earth
separated—the object of such labour, as we
cannot suppose the Indians did dig villanous
saltpetre, being equally mysterious; neither
of which could have been done by temporary
visitants. Nor could such visitants have
made themselves so thoroughly acquainted
with the cave; into every nook of which they
seem to have penetrated, leaving the prints
of their moccasins and naked feet in the sand
and clay of the low branches, and fragments
of their cane torches in the upper ones.
Even in the Solitary Cave, previously unknown
to the guides, we found, in one place,
the print of a naked foot. One would think
the curious fellows had even entered some of
the pits; as there are long ropes, or withes of
hickory bark, sometimes found, which look
as if they might have been prepared for such
a purpose. At all events, it is quite plain
that the Mammoth Cave was once the dwelling-place
of man—of a race of the Anakim,
as some will have it, whose bones were disinterred
in the Vestibule; or, as common-sense
personages may believe, of a tribe of
the common family of Red-men, who, in ages
not very remote, occupied all the fertile valleys
along the rivers of Kentucky. Some
such clan, I suppose, dwelt on Green River,
at Cave Hollow, using the Mammoth Cave
as a kind of winter-wigwam, and—a more
common use of caves among Indians—a
burial place. The tribe has vanished, and
their bones, (to what base uses we may return!)
converted into gunpowder, have been
employed to wing many a death against their
warring descendants.

But of Indians, charnels, and caves no
more: we have reached the confines of day;
yonder it shines upon us afar, a twinkling
planet, which increases as we advance,
changing from pallid silver to flaming gold.

It is the gleam of sunset playing upon the
grass and mosses at the mouth of the cave.

Oh, World, World! he knows not thy loveliness,
who has not lived a day in the Mammoth
Cave!